Warren Betrays Few Supporters She Has Left, Hops in Bed with Big Money
Earlier this week, Elizabeth Warren had her Dr. Faust moment.
The Massachusetts senator looked at her poll numbers.
She looked at her performances in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.
She saw what the polls from Nevada, South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states looked like.
Desperate numbers called for desperate measures.
So, she stepped into the wine cave of moral turpitude and summoned Mephistopheles. “What’s going on?” the devil replied.
Warren was momentarily shaken by the fact that the very apparition of evil used such casual language, but she shrugged it off.
“I am willing to trade my soul for power behind my wildest imagination! I want magic; the power to hypnotize audiences to believe that a wealth tax is constitutional! To make America think ‘Medicare for All’ is affordable! To make an ultra-liberal technocracy sound like a good idea!”
Mephistopheles frowned and brushed some sulfur off his jacket as he collected his thoughts.
“Look,” he finally said, “Hell’s got some budgetary issues right now. That’s a lot to ask. And quite frankly, you’re trading in a soul with … well, some mileage on it. Its resale value is about 1/1,024th what it was new.”
”All right,” Warren sighed. “Counter-offer me, then.”
”I can give you a super PAC and let you pretend that you never railed against big money in presidential campaigns. Oh, and you can totally own Michael Bloomberg in the next debate.”
”That’ll do.”
This is my origin story of how Persist PAC — a pro-Warren super PAC headed by several prominent progressive figures that launched a huge ad buy in the days before the Nevada caucuses — came into being. I’m sure the establishment media would give you something much more quotidian, but I know what’s up.
According to The Hill, the 30-second ad from the PAC features a female narrator painting Warren as a working-class warrior who fights for the little guy.
“When you don’t grow up rich, you learn how to work. When you take on Wall Street, you know how to fight. When the system is broken, you step up to fix it,” the narrator says.
“That’s why Obama picked her … to protect families and fix our broken system.”
This refers to Warren’s work establishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an entirely and unusually unaccountable node of Washington bureaucracy that feels almost as if it belongs in an Ayn Rand novel and not in reality.
The ad buy cost Persist PAC $1 million.
It’s definitely timely, coming in a state where Warren needs a good performance and is mired, yet again, in fourth place in the RealClearPolitics polling average — although polling in Nevada has admittedly been sparse.
And that’s where the Faustian bargain comes in: As recently as the New Hampshire debate, Warren was railing on about how super PAC money was some kind of insidious virus that eats away at a candidate’s ethical being.
“Everyone on this stage except Amy [Klobuchar] and me is either a billionaire or is receiving help from PACs that can do unlimited spending,” Warren said on stage not even a month ago.
“If you really want to live where you say, then put your money where your mouth is and say no to the PACs.”
As “Just Say No” campaigns went, this one didn’t quite measure up to Nancy Reagan’s.
According to The Hill, at a campaign stop Thursday, Warren refused to disavow — and even seemed to endorse — Persist PAC’s ad buy, even though she can’t control the activities of super PACs one way or the other. (Coordination between super PACs and campaigns is illegal.)
“The first day I got in this race over a year ago, I said I hope every presidential candidate who comes in will agree no super PACs for any of us. I renewed that call dozens of times, and I couldn’t get a single Democrat to go along with me,” she said.
“If all the candidates want to get rid of super PACs, count me in. I’ll lead the charge. But that’s how it has to be. It can’t be the case that a bunch of people keep them and only one or two don’t.”
Unbelievably, she also connected her sudden decision to abandon this putative virtue to toxic masculinity or something. (Emphasis, as usual, on the “or something.”)
“We reached the point a few weeks ago where all of the men who were on the debate stage all had either super PACs or they were multibillionaires who could rummage around in their sock drawers and find enough money to be able to fund a campaign,” she said, “and the only people who didn’t have them were the two women.”
“At that point, there were some women around the country who said, ‘That’s just not right.'”
NEW: Here is video of Warren declining to disavow the new super PAC supporting her:
“If all the candidates want to get rid of super PACs, count me in. I’ll lead the charge. But that’s how it has to be. It can’t be the case that a bunch of people keep them and only 1 or 2 don’t.” pic.twitter.com/byxQRjGMfs
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) February 20, 2020
Whenever I hear this construct used, I yearn to ask for habeas corpus: Bring forth these women. Bring forth the people who were telling you that because the Y-chromosomed members of the Democratic field had super PACs backing them that it was high time for Elizabeth Warren to abandon her PAC pledge in the spirit of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug.
No. There were no members of the distaff gender urging her to do this.
What happened is that Warren and her team looked at the poll numbers, looked at the delegate count and looked at how the media was covering her car-crash campaign.
They realized that another disaster in Nevada would potentially finish her off.
And so, she stepped into the wine cave of good and evil and summoned Mephistopheles.
And lo, in exchange for her soul and a handful of feigned ideals, she got herself a super PAC. And one that reminded everybody that once upon a time, Warren was associated with that “Nevertheless, she persisted” tag!
There’s nothing evil about super PACs, which are merely a form of political speech. So long as there’s no coordination between the group and the campaign, you’re golden.
But that’s not what Elizabeth Warren’s been saying this entire campaign cycle.
Up until New Hampshire — the last state to vote, in case your memory is failing — Warren and her acolytes believed this money was somehow evil, that there were strings attached to it that would jerk the candidate hither and to.
But hey, if everyone else is doing it…
As for Warren, Mephistopheles gave her a raw deal.
After all, for a super PAC and owning Michael Bloomberg, she had to give up all of that talk about the perfidies of big money coming from unaccountable places.
Faust also got 24 years from the Devil. Warren, it appears, only got an extension until Super Tuesday.
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