By David L. Bahnsen
Friday, March 06, 2020
The unsurprising news that Senator Elizabeth Warren is
dropping out of the 2020 presidential race invites a lot of questions. How did
Warren, flush with cash from a wildly successful grassroots-fundraising
operation and atop all the national polls in mid October, fail to translate
that lead into actual votes? Why didn’t her string of successful debate
performances make a difference? And most importantly, why is her very
like-minded socialist colleague, Senator Bernie Sanders, still standing while
she’s finished?
Unlike others who’ve failed in their bid for the
nomination this cycle — Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, Cory
Booker — Warren was not undone by a lack of funds, campaign infrastructure,
social-media following, or work ethic. She had all of those things, plus a
campaign team stocked with high-level talent from past Clinton and Obama
campaigns, yet she lost anyway.
And in the end, she has no one to blame but herself.
It is telling that voters rarely question the
authenticity or sincerity of the three people still standing in the race for
the White House — Sanders, former vice president Joe Biden, and President
Trump. Many people loathe what Trump says or does, but they still see him as
someone who acts on his own sincere impulses. Sanders’s conviction is so
sincere that he’s been able to treat his “fifty years of advocating
revolutionary socialism” as a selling
point, rather than an obstacle to be overcome. And Biden, whose resurgence
over the past week was one of the most shocking turnarounds in recent political
history, may be discounted by conservatives and progressives alike, but he’s
certainly not regarded as a phony.
In my book making the ideological case against a Warren
presidency, I accepted at face value that she is a real progressive. Whatever that term means, I am not convinced that
Elizabeth Warren is not it. Her advocacy for extreme, thoughtless environmental
policies strikes me as both misguided and sincere. Her disdain for our nation’s
financial institutions has been fervent and consistent for over a decade. Her
wide array of spending initiatives and socially radical proposals — Medicare
for All, universal pre-K, free college, and student-loan forgiveness — were
backed by policy papers, PowerPoint presentations, and town-hall lectures. She
is wrong on every one of those issues, but there is no evidence that people
rejected her candidacy because of her positions. Indeed, Sanders’s platform
includes many of the same positions as well as ones even more extreme, and it
hasn’t been fatal to his campaign so far.
Warren fell apart not because of her agenda but because
her utter dishonesty about her personal life eroded her credibility as policy
wonk. Her decision to double-down when called on lying about her Native
American ancestry, her debunked allegation that she’d been fired from a school
job for being pregnant, and her false claims that her kids had never attended
private schools all shattered her persona as a thought leader and ideologue.
Her personal opportunism, as well, made it easier to argue that her platform
was opportunistic. So when voters got to pick between Sanders’s socialism and
Warren’s, the choice became very easy.
Warren’s embarrassing performance in her home-state
primary — third place, behind Biden and Sanders — suggested that the public
airing of her iniquities had even taken its toll with her own constituents. The
relative popularity of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal in select far-left
enclaves of Massachusetts did not boost her, despite her convictions on those
issues and her reasonably articulate (if economically and logically lackluster)
advocacy for them. Warren was able to rise to the top of the field, even when
it had more talented candidates still in it, with her entire policy portfolio
on the table. But once she became the most visible candidate, her penchant for
lying about herself became impossible to ignore.
So here we are. Warren will stick around in the public
square longer, no doubt, anxious to see which Democratic candidate will give
her the most in exchange for an endorsement. She maintains a small,
enthusiastic base of supporters, and as we saw on the debate stage throughout
the race, she doesn’t fear the attack-dog role. Her backing still holds value
for Biden and Sanders. But her dishonesty has cost her a chance to be
president, and that should be a lesson to all who would seek the same office.
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