Arthur Schaper: Progressive Elizabeth Warren For President?
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Friday, November 29, 2013
Arthur Christopher Schaper, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™
US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) won the 2012 election unseating Scott Brown, the first Republican US Senator to represent the Commonwealth in nearly four decades. She has a diverse (or divested) genetic pedigree. She is one part (per million) Native American, so she spread her Indian headdress to take on a position at Harvard Law as a Bankruptcy Professor: perfect. She also has pretended academic claims.
By the way, I am part Native-American. My great-great-great (. . .) grandfather was Samuel de Champlain in French Canada. He married a Huron princess, and so today I am part Native-American, unless I prick my thumbs and bleed, and thus lose all my Indian heritage.
As for the collegial background, Warren’s resume is impressive: Rutgers (her alma mater), University of Texas, Austin, Houston, Pennsylvania, and of course Harvard. She’s taught just about everywhere. Then again, a rolling professor gathers no moss, or respect, or anything else.
At any rate, Warren is a vocal consumer advocate, and she chaired a committee shortly after the TARP bailouts to ensure ethics and equity. Why she did not push for putting back all the funds in the US Treasury escapes me. The cry from Main Street, USA was “No Bailouts for Wall Street.” When will DC listen?
Warren won her Senate seat, and now she chairs the committee overseeing Dodd-Frank. If any legislation exposes the long-term failure of government intervention as consumer advocacy, look no further than former US Congressman Bwaney Fwank and former US Senator Christopher Dodd’s intense pressure to regulate banks, which has promoted the Big Banks and punished the local lenders. If TARP was all about protecting us from the Too Big To Fail financial institutions, how come I see a Chase Bank on nearly every corner in my neighborhood? Why are smaller banks getting bought out, and the little guy forced to pay to just to see a teller or keep a checking account open?
On another note, she represents one of the rising rifts within the Democratic Party, a movement beset by operational failures from Obamacare, plus an appeasement agreement with Iran over the stockpiling of Uranium. As one comic quipped, President Obama and his diplomatic corps basically said to Iranians: If you like your radioactive resources, you can keep them
The Democratic Party has been fracturing on the social issues. Conservative Democrats on these issues have reserved their outrage long enough. A former secret agent worked closely with Obama, and now votes Republican. Gun control measures have hurt Democrats in swing states (two recalls ousted Democrats in the Colorado state senate) New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has enlisted millions behind gun-control candidates, only to watch them go down like cardboard ducks in a carnival game
The Democratic Party is now fracturing on the gender issue. Gay marriage has strengthened conservative opposition in certain states. North Carolina banned the transformation of the marriage sacrament 60-30, while Romney barely won the state by one percent.
UN Ambassador Susan Rice of Benghazi fame was pulled for Secretary of State. Former Harvard Law Chairman Lawrence Sumner was President Obama’s first choice for Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Leftist protests demanded the withdrawal of the old white guy, and now old white lady Janet Yellen (Go, Sister, Go!) will face questions. The gender wars are upsetting our schools, unsettling public bathrooms. Now they will decide our nation’s fiscal policy. Time to end the Fed!
And now the inevitable Hillary Clinton has risen again as the 2016 Democratic Presidential candidate for the White House. She was the unstoppable nominee in 2008, until she slowly lost one state delegation after another to neophyte state senator turned US Senator Barack Obama. She supported the war in Iraq. He did not. The progressive core of the new Democratic Party, which ostracized the pro-defense Joe Lieberman (D, then I-Connecticut), which forced the hands of a minority of centrists and Blue Dog Democrats on Obamacare (they voted against it because the legislation was too expansive and expensive) is now wringing its hands, writhing in the wind over George W. Obama, who has expounded the surveillance state into our private lives while pandering to special interests, transposing transparency to mean insularity with a heated hostility to free speech and the press, which would make Richard Nixon look like a William Randolph Hearst fan. President Obama tapped the same corporate cronies of the 2007-2008 Housing Crisis to run the financial recovery during his first term. United States armed forces remain in Afghanistan, while their withdrawal will spell doom for one more misplaced foreign policy venture.
The progressives are tired of war, tired of tax cuts for almost all of us, and the ongoing Guantanomo Bay, Cuba.
Here comes Elizabeth Warren: the Progressive Democrat to upend Hillary Clinton. The New Republic carried an intriguing cover with Americans of all backgrounds wearing Warren masks. Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is not Hillary’s biggest problem. She should worry about a Warren primary challenge from her left.
If Warren did run in 2016, she could ruin Clinton’s chances for Democratic nomination, or at least expose then temper the Democratic Party’s progressive self-destruction.
Arthur Christopher Schaper is a teacher-turned-writer on topics both timeless and timely; political, cultural, and eternal. A life-long Southern California resident, Arthur currently lives in Torrance.
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