What an Elizabeth Warren Presidency Would Look Like ( Warren is a "visionary implementer." )

By Kathleen Geier

January 7 | January 2020 Issue

If Elizabeth Warren wins the Democratic presidential nomination, she will have prevailed against daunting odds. She will have overcome a potentially career-ending scandal (the DNA test debacle) and defeated not only the runner-up in the 2016 Democratic presidential contest, but a popular two-term former vice president. If she defeats President Donald Trump, it would mean an economic populist defeated a corrupt plutocrat, that the most leftwing Democratic presidential nominee in history defeated a racist reactionary, that a woman defeated America’s most famous misogynist. It would be an extraordinarily powerful moment.


Her ambitions for the presidency are not small. Warren proposes to rewrite the rules of the economy by reining in capital, empowering labor and significantly expanding the welfare state.To understand how Warren would create big structural changes as president, it’s helpful to look at how she has made change in the past.

The standard advice to freshmen senators is this: Keep a low profile and suck up to your senior colleagues. As a newly elected senator in 2013, Elizabeth Warren did neither.

Instead, Warren used her perch on the Senate Banking Committee to excoriate ineffectual regulators, duplicitous CEOs, profiteering student lenders and other financial industry ne’er-dowells (interrogations made famous in videos that went viral). She publicly clashed with establishment Democrats such as Sens. Max Baucus (Mont.) and Joe Manchin (W.V.). She even took on President Barack Obama, leading the fight against several administration priorities, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and a pharmaceutical bill she described as “a bunch of special giveaways” to Big Pharma. Warren succeeded in getting under Obama’s skin to such an extent that he took the rare step of criticizing her repeatedly by name.

https://inthesetimes.com/features/Elizabeth-Warren-presidency.html