Elizabeth Warren Is Getting Hillary-ed
Elizabeth Warren Is Getting Hillary-ed
Rebecca TraisterSeptember 27, 2017 11:51 am
Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren at a campaign rally last October. Photo: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
The elite, ambitious candidate, saying one thing on the stump but another to wealthy donors, willing to cede big dreams for incremental, pragmatic fixes … You recognize her, right? Of course you do. She’s Massachusetts Senator and progressive firebrand Elizabeth Warren, who in the past few weeks has co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’s new Medicare for All bill, introduced a bill to preempt state right-to-work laws, prepared to take on leaders of Wells Fargo and Equifax on the Senate floor … and been hit with a blast of right-wing messaging and mainstream news coverage that feels positively uncanny.
The playbook that the right is running against Warren — seeding early criticism designed to weaken her from the left — is pretty ballsy, given that Warren has been a standard-bearer, the crusading, righteous politician who by many measures activated the American left in the years before Bernie Sanders mounted his presidential campaign. Warren is the candidate who many cited in 2016 as the anti-Clinton: the outspoken, uncompromisingly progressive woman they would have supported unreservedly had she only run. Yet now, as many hope and speculate that she mightrun in 2020, the right is investing in a story line about Warren that is practically indistinguishable from the one they peddled for years about Clinton. And even in these early days, some of that narrative is finding its way into mainstream coverage of Warren, and in lefty reactions to it.
It’s a literal investment, one that may mean that conservatives see Warren as among the most dangerous of their future presidential opposition. Last week, Politico reported on efforts by the right to obstruct plenty of potential Trump 2020 challengers, many of them up for reelection in 2018, including Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar. But most notable was the $150,000 sunk by conservative hedge-fund billionaire and Breitbart benefactor Robert Mercer into a super-PAC called Massachusetts First, built specifically to target Warren.
Mercer’s contribution to Massachusetts First is the biggest he’s made to any candidate or political entity in 2017, according to Politico, citing Federal Election Commission records. And despite the fact that Warren is unlikely to face a perilous challenge in her bid for reelection in Massachusetts in 2018, radio ads funded by Mercer have been running all summer, painting the senator and former faculty member at Harvard Law as a “hypocrite professor” who was “raking in hundreds of thousands each year” while her students were “taking on massive debt to listen to Warren lecture them.” As Politico notes, these moves against Warren in the context of a race she’s not likely to be vulnerable in demonstrate that Republicans “are aiming to replicate the pounce-early-and-often model they used against Clinton in 2014 and 2015.”
But in Warren’s case, it’s not just the pace and timing of attacks that recall right-wing anti-Clinton strategy. It’s also the portrayal of her as hypocritical and untrustworthy. The Massachusetts First website describes its mission as providing “the full and real story” of Warren’s failings, a construction that suggests that her self-presentation is inauthentic, as Clinton’s was often presumed to be.
Then of course there is the emphasis on Warren’s personal wealth, here deployed in contrast to those struggling under the burden of student debt, casting as her victims the kinds of young people who were drawn to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign and its emphasis on free college. Presenting Warren as the wealthy Establishment enemy of needy students is a particularly nifty trick, given that she has made the reduction of student-loan debt one of her political crusades, and that this spring she joined with Sanders on the College for All Act. But even the radio ads’ evocation of Warren’s “lectures” offer a view of a woman who is not an ally of young people, but rather at didactic and disdainful remove from them.
The familiar themes of those radio ads bore fruit on a national scale last week, when right-wing Boston radio host Jeff Kuhner confronted the Massachusetts senator after her appearance at a Boston TV station, posting the video on Twitter on September 18. The video shows Kuhner questioning Warren about the price of her Cambridge home and about her Harvard salary, repeatedly calling her a hypocrite, piggybacking on the narrative of the Mercer-backed radio ads: “You are part of the one percent … You are a multimillionaire and you have a mansion in Cambridge, do you not?” Kuhner presses her. “You’re part of the one percent and yet you rail against the one percent. Do you not see the hypocrisy there?”
After posting the video, Kuhner repeatedly tweeted the clip at Donald Trump and conservative news outlets, alongside descriptions of Warren as a “phony Indian, a phony progressive & a phony senator,” who “made millions shilling for big banks, corporations & insurance giants” and “got rich by flipping homes, taking advantage of old ladies. She embodies crony capitalism.” Again, what was odd about the approach was not the revelation that conservatives hate, fear, and want to defeat Elizabeth Warren; it’s that they’re deploying a populist critique — one that questions, rather than emphasizes and makes a bogeyman of, her left bona fides — to do so.
By the end of the week, the Kuhner clip began to gain traction, and was posted at bigger and bigger conservative sites, including The Gateway Pundi, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times , Fox News, and The American Mirror, which was finally linked on Twitter by Drudge.
Most of the right’s coverage of Kuhner’s interaction with Warren described her as “frazzled” or “triggered,” claiming that she “scrambles” when confronted. None of that is true; the video shows her answering his charges cogently, pointing out that the kinds of economic policy she believes in — low college costs and higher wages — permitted her the degree of economic mobility she’s enjoyed. Nevertheless, the descriptive and highly gendered language used to frame the clip by the right closely echoes the popular portrayal of Hillary Clinton as spasmodic, easily rattled and high-strung, paving the way for fake news about Clinton’s ill health and mental fragility. “Fake Indian Elizabeth Warren is so easy to frazzle; all one has to do is call her out on her lies and hypocrisy and she loses her cool,” read the Gateway Pundit.
All this frothing might have stayed confined to the dark reaches of the right — in fact, Shareblue, the site whose 2016 purpose was the defense of Hillary Clinton but which David Brock has since described as “the Breitbart of the Left,” reframed the Kuhner clip as an example of Warren “destroy[ing]” a conservative radio host — had it not been for a mainstream media confluence.
Last Tuesday, the New York Times published a comparatively benign story, tracking what it presented as the two very different paths of two progressive heroes, Warren and Bernie Sanders, toward their possible future bids for the presidency.
Warren, in the estimation of the Times, has begun taking “a traditional and practical course,” like joining the Armed Services Committee and “hosting monthly dinner seminars with policy experts to expand her command of the issues.” Despite her co-sponsorship of Sanders’s single-payer bill, reporter Jonathan Martin writes, Warren is “also looking for other incremental ways” to lower health-care costs. The story, citing Democratic strategist Anita Dunn, suggests that Warren’s emergence as a feminist icon in the wake of her silencing by Mitch McConnell would be a marketable “advantage”: “I bought hand-quilted ‘She Persisted’ pillows” at an upstate New York gift shop,” Dunn says. (There is no acknowledgment that so far, even the wide availability of girl-power pillows hasn’t made the critical difference for women working to gain the Oval Office.) Especially striking, writes Martin, is that Warren, who made her reputation by going after the big banks and last year accused Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf of “gutless leadership,” has been “spending some time with bankers.” Martin cites a July fundraiser Warren attended at the summer home of a UBS executive, and a private meeting she had with longtime bête noir, JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon.
All this is set in contrast to Sanders, whose possible angling toward another presidential bid, according to the paper, does not involve listening to policy experts or talking to bankers or capitalizing on his own compelling brand. “Bernie is a great American story, but have enough people heard it? Probably not,” laments his former campaign manager Jeff Weaver, while Martin describes Sanders as having “shown no willingness to veer from his social justice catechism to tell voters the personal details of his life’s journey.” These are odd claims about Sanders, who in November published a best-selling book which begins, “I grew up in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment,” and includes anecdotes and photos of him as a child, running track, and getting arrested at a civil-rights demonstration.
The Times piece was not officially evaluative of either Warren’s or Sanders’s approaches, but the template it presented — of one candidate, Warren, as the hard-studying, ambitious comer, taking a safer path, willing to talk to bankers and consider incremental change and market the historic nature of her imagined quest as a highly feminized brand, contrasted with the more casual, less strained, and therefore more authentic approach to power exhibited by a competing politician — could have been ripped from the mainstream narrative about Hillary Clinton and any number of her former opponents. At a moment at which Clinton’s name remains bitterly tainted in some quarters of the left, the Clintonian echoes of the story felt especially damning.
And while the Times piece was not built on partisan rancor, its subtler renderings of these two candidates dovetailed fairly neatly with the blaring right-wing messaging working to depict Warren as a duplicitous member of the Establishment elite, especially its quote about Warren from the UBS banker whose home she visited: “I think she is very different in conversation than when she’s on the stump.” There it is, the Hillary-esque suggestion of duplicity, of one public face at odds with private exchanges in wealthy worlds.
The mainstreaming of this caricature of a woman, which appeals to America’s lizard-brain disdain for the hand-in-the-air Tracy Flicks of the world — the kind who take doggedly pragmatic paths to advancement, who’ll say anything to get ahead, who invite policy experts for dinners to learn what they don’t know in a manner that comes across as striving — manages to gently but efficiently discredit Warren both with a right wing that regards ambitious women as threatening and ugly, and a left who might view her reported approach as fake, compromised and emblematic of reviled Establishment mores. It’s a limber exertion.