U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., ended her presidential campaign on Thursday. The New York Times broke the news earlier in the day that she would drop and then later confirmed after Warren made an official statement outside of her home in Cambridge.
She recognized what many of us saw before the Iowa Caucus, there was no recognizable or realistic path for her to the Democratic nomination. With every state contest, the results were worse.
And now we are down to three, really two, but I have to acknowledge that U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, is still in the race. I assume because she enjoys being a squeaky wheel and trolling the other candidates.
The Old Gray Lady entitled their article, “Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Drops Out of Presidential Race.” In this piece where they had this amusing paragraph:
Ms. Warren’s political demise was a death by a thousand cuts, not a dramatic implosion but a steady decline. In the fall, according to most national polls, Ms. Warren was the national pacesetter in the Democratic field. By December, she had fallen to the edge of the top tier, wounded by a presidential debate in October during which her opponents relentlessly attacked her, particularly on her embrace of “Medicare for all.”
Warren was a “front runner” for a nano-second in a handful of national polls. According to Real Clear Politics’ average of national polls, her peak came on October 8, 2019, when she led Biden by a whole two-tenths of one percent.
If I had to describe Warren with two words, the first would be phony.
Nothing about her seemed genuine starting from the very first “let’s have a beer video” to her cultural appropriation of Native Americans to her blatant dishonesty about her proposed wealth tax.
Even most of her ideas were not her own but glomed off of ideas proposed by Bernie “I wrote the damn bill” Sanders.
A second word I would use is scripted.
Everything was rehersed, there was no spontaneity, she found a way to get to her scripted answers during every “town hall” where she would take three “random” questions submitted ahead of time regardless of what the questions were.
Yes, every politician does this to a point, but Warren had it down to an art form. And I don’t say that as a compliment.
Warren was an awful candidate, and the reason she lost support is that voters inclined to vote for her or Bernie Sanders could look at him and see that he was at least telling the truth about his idea.
Sanders admitted he was going to raise taxes on us for Medicare for All. Warren hemmed and hawed at answering that basic question.
To her credit, she helped Biden out in two ways leading up to his campaign’s Super Tuesday resurrection following his expected South Carolina Primary win. The first was her brutal takedown of Mike Bloomberg during the last debate. He was mainly a non-factor in most of the races. Bloomberg underperformed his polling in several states, and I think Warren was a large part of that.
The second is pulling from Sanders’ potential base.
Hopefully, Biden sends her some flowers or a lovely basket of fruit. Some predict that “thank you” could be in the form of being his vice presidential pick, possibly, but I doubt it. Two white seventy-something Northeasterners running at the top of the ticket isn’t inspiring. I suspect his running mate will be a person of color and younger. I don’t have any unique insight into this, but it’s just a hunch that we will not see a Biden-Warren ticket.
After Super Tuesday’s debacle, where she failed to win her home state, we may see the dwindling of her political career.
I, for one, won’t shed any tears.
