Elizabeth Warren Just Gave a Really Important—and Revealing—Speech [View all]

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/194361/elizabeth-warren-just-gave-really-important-and-revealing-speech



If you want to understand the coming intra-party battles on economic issues between progressive Democrats and their moderate colleagues—which will no doubt bleed into the 2016 Democratic presidential primary—Senator Elizabeth Warren’s keynote speech to an AFL-CIO conference on Wednesday might be your best blueprint.

First, let’s note the political moment: President Obama is visiting an auto manufacturing plant in Detroit this week, where he will be “highlighting the workers in the resurgent American automotive and manufacturing sector,” as the White House press office billed it. Then he travels to Phoenix to give a speech “on how the recovering housing sector has helped restore wealth and economic security to millions of middle-class families.”

Obama’s economic message, in short: everything’s going great. It is this argument that Warren took singular aim at Wednesday.

She didn’t call out Obama directly, but based her speech around a December Politico magazine article titled “Everything is Awesome!” (When a politician spends thirty minutes publicly fisking a Politico article, that’s a pretty big clue he or she is trying to rattle the Beltway narrative.)