Warren pivots on Medicare for All in bid to become Biden's VP

[brooklynite]

Politico

In the thick of primary season, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden brawled over Medicare for All: He called her approach “angry,” “elitist,” “condescending”; she shot back anyone who defends the health care status quo with industry talking points is “running in the wrong presidential primary.”

Six months later, with Biden the presumptive nominee and Warren in the running for VP, she is striking a more harmonious chord.

"I think right now people want to see improvements in our health care system, and that means strengthening the Affordable Care Act," she told students at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics this week, while adding that she still wants to get to single payer eventually.

The shift is the latest public signal Warren has sent Biden's way in recent weeks that she wants the job of vice president — and wants Biden to see her as a loyal governing partner despite their past clashes, which go back decades.

[TheCowsCameHome]

1. Please, not Warren this time.

There's simply too much at stake.

[Hortensis]

2. She actually gave many signs of it long before. When we

know who these people are, we can't be jerked around by those always trying to subvert our understanding.

The suggestion that Warren might be betraying her beliefs for ambition is a hit job, not reality.

Warren's always believed in working from within the center of power to harness it for change. She can seem hard to peg, but I think the person who described her as "radical in defense of tradition" came closest. "Tradition" includes the ideals of progressive government serving the people that we inherited from our forebears. Notably, senate leaders have her on the leadership track, and if she remains in the senate she'll eventually advance to top leadership.

So Sen. Warren's always known and accepted (of course!!!) that all healthcare legislation would be created, not by any president, but by congress. While Sen. Sanders relied on magical thinking for how he would get around this enormous reality as president (citizen uprisings forcing congress to cower before their will), Sen. Warren has always been realistic. (She also knows that most voters like and trust the representatives they themselves elect.)

So there's no pivot in ideals or even in how she expects to achieve them. Much as Warren might ideally want the system she advocated for as a presidential candidate, most of the legislators who battled for years and put their careers on the line to create the ACA survived and are still there. She always knew her colleagues weren't about to hand the Republicans a giant, genuinely crazy gift by trashing the ACA most Americans strongly support and giving the RW opposition a new chance to destroy national healthcare. (It would have taken most of a decade to hopefully get most provisions passed and implemented, if possible at all!)

Warren always understood the advances congress passed would have to be through the ACA. The ACA is intended to be a universal healthcare system, only the Republicans stopping it from becoming one, and Warren's been working, as a senator and candidate, to affect its progress and final form by creating voter demand for as much advance as possible as soon as possible.

And having Elizabeth Warren working on domestic policy as a much more powerful assistant president with a big portfolio is an exciting thought.

[brooklynite]

3. Not as late as the Nevada Primary...

[Hortensis]

4. That's part of rousing citizen demand for more. She's not

trying to appeal there to most Nevadans, left and right, who support the ACA.

She's talking especially to those who strongly distrust and reject people like her but make an exception for her because she's differentiating herself from the mainstream.

Not as dishonest as some might want to make out. That crowd may despise "the establishment," but Warren's not exactly a typical establishment pol. Not even typical of the liberal progressive Democrats most of the resentment-motivated types are eager to believe don't exist. And Warren believes in and has never stopped fighting for the healthcare they need and want.

Geeze. It's such a tragedy that Warren didn't run in 2015-2016, but who could see what that would mean then? Sanders wouldn't have moved up to fill the vacuum of demand Warren's passion and achievements created, and Repub/Russia couldn't have augmented the LW populist movement's undermining of faith in Democrats to help elect Trump.

Sen. Warren virtually certainly would have lost to HRC; but she'd have set to work electing her and Democrats across the nation and then gone on to whatever great things she would be accomplishing right now in whatever position she would be holding.

COUNTDOWN TO NOVEMBER 3: 166 days.