Elizabeth Warren is a rock star, but we need more than rock stars to turn things around

eridani

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Sun Nov-20-11 03:32 AM
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Elizabeth Warren is a rock star, but we need more than rock stars to turn things around

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/8488-focus-heaven-is-a-place-called-elizabeth-warren

Among other things, what Warren offers is a reasonable, expert face for the free-floating anger currently on display at Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere. She can get wonky about the economy when she wants to, but what sets her apart is her ability to tell a coherent, populist story about it in a way that other members of her party are either unwilling or unable to do.

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The question of what it would take for Warren to maneuver through the Senate is particularly prickly given that Warren's aims sound as outsize, and perhaps as na�ve, as the expectations of her followers.

"I don't want to go to Washington to be a co-sponsor of some bland, little bill nobody cares about," she told me. "I don't want to go to Washington to get my name on something that makes small change at the margin." Responding to my suggestion that she must run a grass-roots campaign in part because she won't have support from banks, Warren said: "That's absolutely true if you think the objective is to win. For me, it's about more than that."

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How to sell hope when so many feel hopeless is Warren's biggest messaging challenge. Her supporters may be willing to forget the past four years and renew their faith in her as their next salvation, but Warren clearly thinks about the dissonance of what happened when the last change-peddlers hit Washington.

"I thought, 2008, that's it, that is the watershed moment," Warren says. "We put sensible people in the House, in the Senate and in the White House." But even with the new leadership, Warren said, "the people who broke the market doubled down on the failed policies. This was not supposed to happen. But it did happen."

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But many of the people looking to Warren, as they did to Obama before her, are expecting material things - like readable credit-card pitches or safe bridges or jobs or a vote on a bill to create jobs - that are, at the moment, figments as imaginative as dragons and their slayers. And that's dangerous, because when the person we decided was going to fix it all isn't able to change much, it's not just that we get blue but also that we give up. We mistake the errors of our own overblown estimations for broken promises. And instead of learning, reasonably, that one person can't do everything, we persuade ourselves that no person can do anything.

The key is not just emotional investment in election-year saviors but also an engagement with policy. A commitment to organized expressions of political desire - like those that have been harnessed so effectively in recent years on the right - have been absent for far too long in Democratic politics. Now, with labor protests, campaigns to block voter suppression and personhood measures and the occupations of cities around the nation, there seem to be some small signs that liberals are remembering that politics requires more of them, that they need movements, not just messiahs. But their engagement must deepen, broaden and persist beyond last week's elections and well beyond next year's elections if there is any chance for politicians like Warren to succeed.