Now that Elizabeth Warren has officially dropped out, many Warren supporters are torn over who to support. You’d think that given the ideological similarities between Warren and Bernie Sanders, and given the long history of antagonism between Warren and Joe Biden, that moving to Sanders would be a no-brainer. This thinking underlies the theory by some Sanders supporters that Warren, by staying in the race through Super Tuesday, cost Sanders dearly and may have cost him the nomination.
But in real life, that’s not the case at all.
This is confirmed by my informal survey of what Warren supporters are thinking, both online and in personal interactions. Particularly for the ones online but by no means exclusive to them, the recurring theme I see among those Warren supporters who are reluctant to back Sanders or have outright decided to support Biden is how badly they feel Warren and her supporters were treated by certain Sanders supporters.
Warren supporters, I get the resentment at the way you feel some Sanders people have treated Warren and no doubt many of you. I’ve personally experienced it, hell I even wrote a diary about this subject a few weeks ago.
But in this diary, I would like you to step back and have some perspective here. As horrid as the snake emojis and so on were, I need to remind you of who it was that did far more to damage Warren’s campaign. Remember, Warren was riding high in the polls just 5 months ago, but after peaking in mid-October her numbers came tumbling down. And it wasn’t Bernie bros who were responsible for that. Rather, it was all of this:
It was also this:
“We heard it tonight: a yes or no question that didn’t get a yes or no answer,” Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said. “This is why people here in the Midwest are so frustrated with us, with Washington in general and Capitol Hill in particular.
“Your signature, Senator, is to have a plan for everything, except this,” Buttigieg continued. “No plan has been laid out to explain how a multi-trillion-dollar hole in this Medicare for All plan that Senator Warren is putting forward is supposed to get filled in.”
Moments later, Klobuchar joined the criticism, pointing out that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont had acknowledged that taxes would go up for the middle class—albeit far less than for the wealthy—even as their total costs would decrease. “At least Bernie’s being honest,” the senator from Minnesota said. “I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we will send the invoice.”
Not to be outdone, O’Rourke cited Warren’s plan to levy a wealth tax on assets over $50 million in saying his rival was “more about being punitive” and pitting people against one another “instead of lifting people up.” Warren replied that she was “shocked” to be called punitive. “I don’t have a beef with billionaires,” she said, before launching into a part of her stump speech where she points out that even the most successful entrepreneurs in the country built their businesses using the infrastructure, educational system, and law-enforcement protection “that everyone paid for.”
www.theatlantic.com/...
Notice that in the excerpt above from the October debate, the moderate candidates who ganged up on Warren — Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and O’Rourke — were the same exact people who endorsed Biden en masse last weekend. And it should be noted that while the moderate candidates piled on Warren, it was Bernie Sanders who notably did not jump in.
The pundits above who I cited are regularly on the supposedly liberal MSNBC and are featured prominently in the op-ed pages that many mainstream, moderate Democrats read and are heavily influenced by. As much influence as Twitter has gained over the years, cable TV and newspapers still have far more influence over far more Democrats than do Sanders supporters on Twitter or on certain toxic podcasts.
That much was obvious given the results of Super Tuesday. Biden’s victories were boosted by an avalanche of media coverage he received in the days leading up to Super Tuesday, fueled by the endorsements of the moderate candidates I named, not to mention wall-to-wall gushing commentary from the centrists and Never Trumpers who seem to have such sway over many older, moderate and even some liberal Democrats these days.
I single all these folks out because if, in making your minds up, you are reluctant to support Sanders because of bad behavior from some of his supporters, I implore you to remember who it was that actually took Warren down. If you feel resentment at Warren’s demise, the centrists who I name above are the ones who you should really be resentful at. Again, they have a lot more influence over actual Democratic voters than online Bernie bros.
To be clear, Warren is not without fault here, she was the frontrunner so it was expected that the attacks would come, and she did not handle them particularly well at times. Also, I do not fault the centrists for going after Warren. She’s a progressive so of course the centrists opposed her. But make no mistake, it was the centrists who ganged up and did serious damage to her, and ultimately knocked her from her position as frontrunner.
So if you’re wondering who your real allies are here, it sure as hell isn’t the crowd that’s standing with Biden. Now that Warren has dropped out, these figures have suddenly started saying nice things about her and are trying to deflect blame for Warren’s demise to Sanders supporters. For example, here’s Jennifer Rubin, who is a Resistance favorite for some godforsaken reason, just the other day:
Do not be fooled. This is the same person who a couple weeks ago wrote this when Warren was busy annihilating Bloomberg:
As much resentment as I might have toward some assholish Sanders supporters, I hold these centrists and Never Trumpers far more accountable for the demise of Warren’s candidacy. It was they who for weeks last fall were ripping her day in and day out on TV, in the papers, and on social media. And it worked, as moderates fled Warren while a number of progressives, convinced that Warren was vulnerable, increasingly turned to Sanders.
The centrists did this clearly hoping that a moderate would benefit, but being the political geniuses they are, instead it was Bernie Sanders, who they’d previously left for dead, who came roaring back. In their sheer panic, they briefly flocked to Bloomberg as their shining prince, but in a bit of poetic justice Warren, who as with Sanders earlier the centrists had left for dead, swooped in like an avenging angel and utterly destroyed who was then their latest centrist savior du jour.
Now they have teamed up to take out the lone progressive left in the race. Sanders is obviously not my first choice of candidate, and let me tell you, it’s been very uncomfortable being on the same side now as a lot of people who said such terrible things about Warren, and I’m not over that stuff. But I also have not lost sight of who it was that embarked on a concerted and ultimately successful effort to take down Warren’s candidacy. That the same gang is now concern trolling us to oppose Sanders as if they were acting in good faith or in our best interests is downright insulting.
I support Sanders now mostly because I am a progressive, and I simply align with him on the issues more than with the centrist Biden. But I also want a bit of political payback against those centrists who took out Warren. And if you want payback as well, you should work to elect the worst nightmare of those centrists and the person who is the lone progressive still standing, Bernie Sanders.