Elizabeth Warren Takes Aim at Democrats, Republicans
By
Peter Nicholas
Jan. 7, 2015 10:00 a.m. ET
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren delivers a stinging critique of Republicans and Democrats alike in a speech this morning that says policies pushed by both parties have created financial hardships for everyday families while further enriching a narrow sliver of Americans.
At a Washington, D.C., forum hosted by union group AFL-CIO, the freshman Democratic senator from Massachusetts said headlines suggesting the economy is rebounding don’t square with the realities endured by households struggling with student loans, burdensome mortgage payments and sluggish wages.
Elizabeth Warren in December ENLARGE
Elizabeth Warren in December Associated Press
Ms. Warren is a popular figure among liberal Democrats who want her to run for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016. If Ms. Warren were to jump in the race she would be a heavy underdog against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is widely expected to announce her candidacy in the coming months. Ms. Warren has said she isn't running for president and plans to finish out her term.
The Draft Warren effort reflects a yearning in Democratic circles for a populist Democrat who will, if nothing else, force Mrs. Clinton to move left and make addressing income inequality a policy priority.
In prepared remarks released by her office, Ms. Warren says the falling jobless rate and low inflation are small comfort to millions of Americans who still haven’t recovered from the financial collapse in 2008.
“If you are young and starting out life with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt locked into high interest rates by Congress, unable to find a good job or save to buy a house, how are you benefiting from low inflation?” she asks.
Ms. Warren acknowledges that the national economy is recovering, but says, “There have been deep structural changes in this economy, changes that have gone on for more than 30 years, changes that have cut out hardworking, middle class families from sharing in this overall growth.”
In the speech, Ms. Warren doesn’t mention Bill or Hillary Clinton by name. Yet she took some veiled swipes at the family that has been a fixture of national politics for the past quarter century.
Former President Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party to the center in his two terms in office, ushering in free-trade policies, overhauling the nation’s welfare system, and signing a deregulatory bill that lifted constraints on commercial banks and other financial institutions. In his State of the Union address in 1996, Mr. Clinton proclaimed that the “era of big government is over.”
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Ms. Warren, in her speech, said, “Pretty much the whole Republican Party—and, if we’re going to be honest, too many Democrats—talked about the evils of ’big government’ and called for deregulation. It sounded good, but it was really about tying the hands of regulators and turning loose big banks and giant international corporations to do whatever they wanted to do—turning them loose to rig the markets and reduce competition, to outsource more jobs, to load up on more risks and hide behind taxpayer guarantees, to sell more mortgages and credit cards that cheated people. In short, to do whatever juiced short-term profits even if it came at the expense of working families.”
Ms. Warren also singled out Wal-Mart Stores Inc., a company that figures in Mrs. Clinton’s past. As first lady of Arkansas, Mrs. Clinton served on the company’s board of directors for six years.
Ms. Warren said that while corporate profits and gross domestic product are rising, “if you work at Wal-Mart and you are paid so little that you still need food stamps to put groceries on the table, what does more money in stockholders’ pockets and an uptick in GDP do for you?”
Ms. Warren put forward a few ideas for brightening the prospects of middle class families.
She called for new spending on roads, bridges, and education. Such projects would be financed through “real, honest-to-goodness changes that make sure that we pay—and corporations pay—a fair share to build a future for all of us,” she says.
At least one other potential Democratic candidate is unwilling to cede to Ms. Warren the status as the party’s foremost populist firebrand.
Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, in his single public appearance since launching his presidential exploratory committee, has suggested that he would make income inequality a central focus.
“We have a strata of people at the very top who for a complicated set of reasons have grown further and further away from the rest of our society,” Mr. Webb told reporters in Richmond, Va., last month. “We need to find proper avenues in terms of government policy to make sure that equal opportunity and economic fairness can exist.”
He continued: “There has to be a way, without slowing down the ability of those in our society that are the risk takers and the profit makers, there has to be a way to make sure that people are equally paid their fair share of the obligations that we have to keep this country going.”
Still, it is Ms. Warren—not Mr. Webb—who has energized a Democratic liberal wing that believes Mrs. Clinton is too closely tied to Wall Street banking interests.
Mr. Webb will seek to change that if he decides to mount a serious presidential campaign, an aide said.
“The issue of economic inequality and the dangers of foreign intervention are things he’s talked about for a long time, long before Sen. Warren came along,” said Mr. Webb’s communications director, Craig Crawford. “That just goes to a big reason to why he’s seriously considering this. He thinks it’s time for working people to have a president.”
—Reid Epstein contributed to this article.
