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Posted on 10/15/2014 6:44:39 AM PDT by SJackson
Elizabeth Warren: The Rich White Man’s Candidate
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 15, 2014 @ 12:58 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 7 Comments
The political establishment with its clouds of consultants, advisers and fixers rarely bothers glancing out of its enclaves of wealth and privilege to take stock of America. Instead it taps at the virtual pages of the paper of record on the appropriate app, nods its head at having its prejudices confirmed and moves on.
And that is why the Elizabeth Warren political express remains convinced that a wealthy professor and government insider who occasionally says all the approved things about Wall Street that Obama used to say is the Democratic Party’s best hope for connecting with the youth, women and the working class.
Actual polling though shows that Warren has twice as much support among the $50,000 and over group than she does at the under $50,000 level. Warren is also least popular with 18-29 year olds. She’s so unpopular with them that even seniors, a traditionally conservative group, like her more than they do.
Class warfare is a game for those with money. The family that is just scraping by doesn’t have the time to worry about how many times their annual salaries a CEO makes. Envying billionaires is the occupation of millionaires. Envying them is the occupation of the upper end of the middle class.
Elizabeth Warren reminds most teens and twenty-somethings of a particularly boring professor who combines insincerity with obtuseness because that is exactly what she is. Those most concerned about her solutions for student loan debt are Educrats and financiers smelling another windfall bailout.
Not only does Warren fail with the blue collar voter and the young voter, but she even suffers from a gender gap. Warren is more popular with men than with women. And she’s also more popular with white than non-white voters.
Instead of being some kind of revolutionary, Elizabeth Warren’s main appeal is to rich white men.
Her 2012 victory didn’t prove that she was popular. Warren just happened to be the beneficiary of Obama’s turnout demographics. In exit polls, she won a decisive majority among voters who said that they were voting for whomever their party’s candidate happened to be, but lost badly among voters who said that they were looking for an “honest and trustworthy” candidate.
Warren lost moderates and independents. She just happened to be a blue candidate in a blue state.
The makeup of the electorate consisted of 60% Obama voters and 38% Romney voters. Warren won by far less than Obama did and held on to only 85% of the Obama votes. Not only doesn’t Warren hold the secret to appealing to disaffected voters, but she couldn’t even manage to hang on to all of the Obama votes in liberal Massachusetts. Compare that to only 3% of Romney voters who defected to Warren.
But political wishful thinking isn’t limited to the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has some serious thinking to do about its candidates.
The Chris Christie presidential express is just as delusional as the Elizabeth Warren campaign train to nowhere. Warren and Christie are party darlings whose local election wins in blue states were wrongly generalized into national potential because of the new ways of connecting to voters that they seemed to represent. No one bothered to ask which voters they were connecting to and how reliably.
Among Republicans, Christie picks up 17% percent of the votes of those making over $50,000 but only 5% among those making under $50,000. No other candidate has a gap this big. On the other side of the dial, Jeb Bush largely leads because of support from the under $50,000 demographic. Without them, he shows up only in fourth place. Ted Cruz does twice as well among the under than over $50,000 voters.
These numbers provide no easy answers, but they should lead to some serious thinking. While candidates like Marco Rubio and Rand Paul beat the drum for broadening the party through diversity, they perform far worse among the under $50,000 vote than the over $50,000 vote. It’s easy to dismiss such numbers, but they haunted Mitt Romney in the primaries when he lost blue collar voters to Santorum or Gingrich only to slide by on wealthier voters and they then hurt him in the general election.
Obama would not have gotten a second term if Republicans had been better at white working class voter turnout. The Elizabeth Warren threat may have proven to be as phony as her Native American heritage, but that doesn’t mean that the Democrats won’t be able to find a winning candidate.
The Republicans have spent the last two elections and the current election campaigning on Obama’s failures. By 2016 they will longer be able to run against Obama the way that the Democrats lost the ability to run against Bush. The Republican Party will face new challenges despite never having mastered the old challenges of the Obama years. The GOP still remains a party with an identity crisis.
The Democratic Party lied its way across its own identity crisis. Elizabeth Warren, a millionaire lawyer campaigning for the underclass, an overpaid professor promising to help students and a member of a white elite passing as a Native American, represents everything hypocritical and contradictory about it.
Elizabeth Warren is the Democratic Party; a party of rich white liberals pretending to be diverse activists for the working class. It’s a scam made possible by allies running a powerful embedded media operation.
The Republican Party can’t pull a Warren. It faces a trio of former Republicans in Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren who moved on to become compulsive liars. Confronting one set of opportunistic Blue State Democrats with another set of opportunistic Blue State Republicans is a formula for failure. There’s a reason that opportunists like Biden and Warren left the Republicans behind to become Democrats. The Democratic Party offers unlimited corruption with no accountability.
The Republican Party’s identity crisis is its advantage. It can still rethink its establishment and listen to ordinary Americans. It doesn’t have to believe the latest nonsense making the rounds in Washington.
The opportunity is there.
Hillary Clinton, like Elizabeth Warren, is on shaky terms with younger voters. Her attempts to connect with blue collar voters torpedoed her book tour. The only difference between Clinton and Warren is that Hillary has Bill as a campaign asset. Otherwise they’re practically the same phony person.
Americans aren’t looking for another representative of the establishment slumming with occasional slams at Wall Street before heading off to a Wall Street fundraiser. They want authenticity.
If Republicans put forward their own version of Elizabeth Warren, they will be betting that they can still run against Obama in 2016. It may be a bet that they and the rest of the country will lose.
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Fauxcahontas speak with forked tongue...................
If Princess Hillary wins, the term we will hear daily is “First Man” to describe Bubba. Then, liberal and left-leaning women will be shrieking at the mere mention because it signifies the woman on top role and the man in the passenger’s seat. Bubba will play the role perfectly because he remains the frat boy type who will make women think anything in order to get “action.” That will be America’s future if not reliving its 1990s past.
” ... if enough women fall for the gimmick of being a victim, then Dizzy Miss Lizzie or Princess Hillary will win.”
Count on it. I have heard more than a few women who profess they are ready to vote for a woman, any woman. In the politically correct, celebrity politics of the idiocracy of America, the Republicans better nominate a woman, or they don’t stand a chance.
Joni ?
I don’t agree with the piece. Once she runs on a platform of student loan forgiveness, coupled with televised public floggings of bankers, those reluctant groups will rush to her side. She is a cunning and talented demagogue.
A fugly professor is the best candidate to connect with youth and the working class? I think not.
Student loan forgiveness appeals to college students (who don't vote), soon to be college students (who can't vote), those still struggling under student loans, university administrators, professors and bankers.
That's a fair sized group, but nothing compared to union workers and other non-college types, senior citizens, people who have already completed the struggle to pay off their student loans, and fiscally responsible sane people.
Such a proposal would help Warren win the Bonnaroo crowd, but she doesn't need help with them.
Run on really shrinking the government, but phrase it in ways that are immune to the Democrats "giving the government to corporations" counter-neener.
Fight for strong privacy rights, healthcare freedom, slashing government intrusion, flat or fair tax, ending corporate welfare and corporate taxes, gun rights, strengthening political speech rights, etc.
People who owe student debt would crawl over broken glass to vote for this. High school guidance counselors would be marching 18 year olds to the polls. Realtors, car dealers and others would see all of that income suddenly available and be doing cartwheels in the streets.
The vast majority who were getting scroood would just shrug and look at it as one more government waste of money.
For most people, after enough years of watching them throw money down rat holes to buy votes, their giveadamn is broken.
The student loan forgiveness is a bunch of smoke and mirrors. I tell anyone I know good luck trying to get that particular goodie. It has a cap of $25,000 and, when the SL is forgiven, the borrower has the amount forgiven show up as income. Income to be taxed, that is..
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