Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren has many fans, including me, who would like her to be President of the United States, but fully understand her refusal. We have an immediate appreciation of her.

And her opponents abhor everything about her.  She relates in her new, tenth, book, “A Fighting Chance,” how President Obama's senior advisers explained to her why he wasn't going to nominate her to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she conceived, created, loved and chaired in its first months. They acknowledged her competence and appropriateness for the job and said: “But ...for some reason, you are like a red-hot poker in the eye of Republicans.”

Now, when Elizabeth, or anyone,  draws out such strong emotional responses like that from both sides of aisle, you can be fairly confident that she is touching very basic issues. I think also that our emotional responses to her are of such great depth and strength that they must be “over-determined.” That is to say, there has to be more than just one item, one reason, one cause, of feelings of such depth and strength.

Elizabeth is not trivial, inconsequential, game-playing, bought, beholden, stupid, uninformed nor emotionally stunted. She confronts her opponents with the real issues that go deep, basic issues that they don't want to face, and she doesn't leave anyone an out.

One of those issues is that  the system is rigged, “hijacked by the rich and powerful,” rigged in favor of the “haves,” but the “haves” simply do not want to admit this. An example of this is the fact that the big banks, and she is quite knowledgeable about them, can easily buy off publicly-elected politicians. There is absolutely no denying this fact on the conscious level. She writes of preparing to give her talk at the Democratic convention in Charlotte:

“The system is rigged. That's what I wanted to talk about. For me, that captured what was wrong with the country, how our government has been hijacked by the rich and powerful. How it didn't have to be this way. How we could do better.”

Another issue Elizabeth presents unavoidably is the woman question. She is so far ahead of her opponents in her clarity and standing on the issue that they don't have the remotest conscious clue of where she is. I mentioned Christina Romer's comment in a previous post on first meeting Elizabeth: “Why is it always the women? Why are we the only ones with balls around here?”

There is a male strutting that goes on by men who consider themselves important, superior, more experienced, more knowledgeable, wiser, tougher, and all that. They dress and posture for the role, and feel free to talk over you when you are talking, and they cultivate a million ways to express how superior and important they are. Sometimes it's hilarious even and sometimes it is just pathetic. In any case, they pick up fairly quickly when you're not buying into it and therefore are not pleased with you. Not a bit. You are then a lethal enemy to everything they “are.” You are like a red-hot poker in their eye.