You may not know her name, but she is someone you need to know. Her name is Elizabeth Warren. I have been pushing her name to anyone who will listen. The reason is simple: She's the face of future Democratic majorities.
As I will show below, she understands the problems we face, and understands the solutions that are called for facing them. This is a rare thing in American public life. Someone who speaks truth to power. That power is Wall Street. That truth is what Wall Street is doing to Main Street.
She understands the plight of the dwindling American middle class in ways that Democrats have forgotten:
"Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?
Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.
Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed."
LINK
The rise and decline of the American middle class is not by any stretch of the imagination an easy story to read about. We are all vested in the American dream. Yet, it is a story that needs to be told if we are to regain the dream in reality rather than just our imagination.
It seems after the Massachusetts lose last week there is finally a desire to hear that story at the White House:
I was an early supporter of the idea that President Obama should choose his advisors as he sees fit because that should not affected the policies. And, yet, I quickly realized after the stimulus how wrong I am on the subject. Policies need strong advocates who truly believe in them. Without these advocates, there will always be the incentive to enact half-ass measures a la Geithner and Summers. Like me, Warren is a believer in the middle class. Until recently, her voice has been one of only a few in the wilderness sounding the alarms to the destruction of prior Republican AND Democratic policies on the middle class.
We can not change the trajectory of this country or secure Democratic majorities for a generation until we address the reasons why we find ourselves in this mess. Half ass measures like Democrats putting out the flames of the failures of neo-liberal economic policy making will not work.
The article continues:
"Warren has spent her career laying the groundwork for what might be called progressive populism. From her perch in Cambridge, she’s excoriated the unfair credit and lending practices that, in part, gave rise to the current crisis. She was the architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which, if created, would regulate credit cards and mortgages in the same way home appliances are regulated now. (Full disclosure: Warren once wrote about the agency in the publication I help edit.) And well before the bubble broke in the summer of 2007, when America was still riding high on George W. Bush’s economy, Warren was speaking out against the incredible pressure the 21st century economy was putting on the middle class. She was derided as a Cassandra, but she was right."
I am not prone to giving a shit about personality. Indeed, this is not why I support Ms. Warren now. It is not her personality that turns me on to her. What makes me feel that the need to endorse her as someone you should know is because of the values she advocates. The values need to seep into the Democratic consciousness. We need to become one more the party of FDR. Not the Party of Clinton.
"Sure, a Warren campaign would provoke guffaws from the right: What does a Harvard professor really know about an economic crisis? Yet underneath the polished pedigree is a teenage bride from Oklahoma. She’s as much an everyday person as Scott Brown; she just happens to be a brilliant scholar as well. When she’s championing the middle class, she’s not doing so because it’s politically expedient, but because she feels connected to it in a way few politicians are. And she has the intellectual chops to convert that connection into dramatic policy change. Sadly, few politicians can say that, either."
If the Democrats want to win through real pragmatism rather than the branding called pragmatism, we need to remember our true nature. She is that truth even as we are told that truth is the DLC. The DLC is our past. She is our future.
Update [2010-1-25 10:11:57 by bruh1]: Actions, not just words. I agree with everyone below who says that it is not enough to brand one self as now interested in economic populism that will help the American middle class. The thing we want to see from the White House and the Democrats are policies that reflect actions on this front. Talking to Warren is under the words category until we see a shift from neo-liberalism to economic policies focused on "middle class capitalism."