Elizabeth Warren

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      in Elections

      Elizabeth Warren: Democratic party was reluctant to nominate a woman in 2020

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      In a new book, the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren suggests part of the reason for her failure in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination lay in the party’s reluctance to nominate another woman.“I had to run against the shadows of Martha and Hillary,” Warren writes in Persist, which will be published on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported.Hillary Clinton, a former New York senator and secretary of state, lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.Martha Coakley, an attorney general of Massachusetts, lost a 2010 election for a US Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy, to Scott Brown, and a 2014 gubernatorial election to Charlie Baker.Both women started as favourites but suffered losses which dealt crushing blows to Democrats on the national stage.Warren led the 2020 Democratic primary early on. In her book, the Post said, she repeats a conversation with her husband, Bruce Mann, who said: “Babe, you could actually do this. You could be president.” Warren also writes about she imagined her inauguration.But she did not win any states and withdrew on 5 March. With most of the rest of the field, she endorsed Joe Biden against the progressive standard bearer, Bernie Sanders. Biden went on to beat Trump convincingly but Warren was passed over for vice-president and a cabinet post.On the page, Warren attributes some of the blame for her defeat to a failure to explain how she would pay for her ambitious progressive proposals, particularly on expanding healthcare.She also reportedly “offers a heavy dose of praise for allies and competitors and little score-settling or tale-telling”, calling Biden a “steady, decent man” and Sanders “fearless and determined”.The Post said Warren’s book “glosses over” a clash with Sanders over whether he told her a woman could not beat Trump. Warren says he did. Sanders says he did not.Warren considers a debate in Nevada in which she assailed the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg over his behaviour towards women and compared him to Trump. Warren, the Post said, writes that she was surprised Bloomberg did not immediately respond.“Like so many women in so many settings, I found myself wondering if he had even heard me,” she writes.Warren’s book, her third, also considers a previously disclosed incident at the University of Houston when she says a male colleague tried to grope her, and its effect on her academic career.The book’s title comes from a famous clash with Mitch McConnell in 2017. Attempting to silence Warren during debate, the then Republican majority leader said: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”The Post said text on the back of Warren’s book says it is about “the fight that lies ahead”.“Warren offers few hints on whether she might run again for president,” the paper said. “At 71, she is younger than Biden and could plausibly launch another campaign in 2024, particularly if he does not seek a second term.” More

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      in US Politics

      Fit for office? From Trump to Abbott, 'vitality' is too often conflated with character in politics | Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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      It was important to US president Donald Trump to beat Covid-19. Not to recover from it, or to be successfully treated for it, but to beat it, as you would a wrestling enemy with the back of a chair. Already he has begun reframing his hospital discharge as a sign of strength. On Monday, campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp told Fox News: “We’re going to defeat this virus. We’re not going to surrender to it like Joe Biden would surrender,” deliberately leaving open the interpretation that the relevant “surrender” was getting sick and dying. The president retweeted columnist Miranda Devine’s characterisation of him as an “invincible hero, who not only survived every dirty trick the Democrats threw at him, but the Chinese virus as well”.It is the latest instalment in a long history of the conflation between physical fitness and fitness for office, as though facts about a person’s character can be deduced from whether they get sick.Rightwing, authority-hungry leaders often make this move. From the state of their bodies we are supposed to deduce things about the state of their person. Vladimir Putin rides horses shirtless; shoots tigers; hugs bears. Jair Bolsonaro removed his mask after his Covid-19 diagnosis to show reporters how little it affected him. “Just look at my face, I’m fine”, he said.When these are the characters who voice a connection between physical wellness and moral character, the falsity of that connection is obvious. It is cartoonish, even – Trump himself is so obviously unfit (apparently owing to a belief that humans are born with finite heartbeats and to exercise is to waste them) that it’s almost impossible to take the position seriously.But the presumed link between physical health and strength and worthiness is far more politically widespread. In March a staffer for Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren tweeted a photograph of her jogging jauntily up a set of stairs, hair springing with her gait, while fellow candidate Bernie Sanders trailed behind her on an escalator, paunched and balding. “This hits me so hard,” said the staffer, assuming an obvious connection between physical mobility and leadership.The character endorsements for “fighters” who make it through disease are common; Gabrielle Giffords’ recovery from a cranial gunshot wound was used to show her strength of character, and Barack Obama –in his own right a good athlete – took many photographed opportunities to play basketball in shirtsleeves. Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott was possessed of genuine physical strength, which the public was seldom able to forget, as his rivals needed help to do a pull-up or failed to sink a basket.The assumption in all cases is that the visual impression of a person’s body is a reasonable guide to their character, or that since certain traits express themselves physically, the physical lack of those things shows they are lacking in the person’s character. This is just a bad and backwards deduction; intellectually energetic people are often physically spry but not all un-spry people lack intellectual energy. But this does not stop candidates leveraging physical wellness as a sign of some deeper strength.Now, of course, a candidate for political office has to be well enough to do the job. There are reasonable criticisms of an ageing political class and of specific individuals who stay in their jobs past the point where they can do them well. When your job involves working on other people’s behalf, you have to be able to do it better than the next best candidate, and there are some forms of physical wellness that bear on whether that’s true.But the broader connection between vitality, power and physical health is damagingly false whether it comes out of Trump’s mouth or the Warren campaign’s. It should be seen with special suspicion by those committed to accessible healthcare, a policy built on the idea that whether you are sick is not a function of what you deserve and that usual interventions of character will not save us.If – as most of us do – we believe that physical illness is not a sign of decrepit character or weakness, then we have to be careful about the photonegative thought that physical wellness is a sign of burnished character or strength. It is not only Trump and his fellow rightwing personality-leaders who seek to leverage that thought. Political positioning everywhere leverages the idea of physical health as strength, which in turn licenses the associated thought that physical illness is weakness. Whichever side of politics it appears on, that thought hurts millions of people. As any sufferer of chronic illness will tell you, the presumed connection between character and body runs deep in society, in the glances of strangers, the minds of loved ones.The president’s bizarre machismo around the virus is just the latest and most visible expression of that thought. Perhaps seeing it in such an extreme form can help us identify its more pedestrian, creeping, insidiously ordinary forms. We would do well to regard them, too, with the same sense of absurdity.• Eleanor Gordon-Smith is a writer and ethicist currently at Princeton University More

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      in US Politics

      'A savagely broken food system': Cory Booker wants radical reform … now

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      From a viral pandemic to the movement for racial justice to the worsening climate crisis, Senator Cory Booker says the massive challenges facing the US right now are all tied to a “savagely broken food system”.And last week, his most recent challenge to that system gained new momentum, when a coalition of 300 farm, food, and environmental advocacy organizations sent a letter to Congress urging legislators to pass a bill that would eventually eliminate the country’s largest concentrated animal feeding operations (Cafos).Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, Booker, a New Jersey senator who ran for the democratic presidential nomination earlier this year, says: “Nobody seems to be calling out how multinational, vertically integrated industrial agricultural companies are threatening American wellbeing, and I just think that the more people learn about these practices, the more shocked they are.“I don’t think most Americans realize that the way we raise animals is such a betrayal of the heritage of our grandparents. I don’t think they realize that … these big companies like Smithfield and Cargill and others have our American farmers now living like sharecroppers in constant debt, forced to follow their rules. I’ve watched the suffering in North Carolina of minority communities who live around Cafos and can no longer breathe their air … and I’ve seen workers in the meatpacking plants and how dangerous those plants are.“Everybody is losing in this system – except for the massive corporations that have taken over the American food system.”Booker was elected to the Senate in 2013, after serving as mayor of Newark, New Jersey, from 2006 to 2013. During his time in the Senate he has focused his efforts on progressive issues like criminal justice reform, reducing economic inequality and increasing access to healthcare.More recently, the food system and the way it shapes inequalities in the US has emerged as one of his defining interests. As mayor of Newark, where more than 50% of the city’s residents are people of color, Booker observed a high rate of poverty and food insecurity. “I learned early in my time as mayor, when I was focused on things like criminal justice reform and economic justice, that all of these issues and injustices were intersectional, and you have to deal with them with a holistic view,” he says.“Kids who walk into bodegas can buy a Twinkie product cheaper than they can buy an apple because 90% of our agriculture subsidies go to four major monocrops,” he says. Workers exposed to dangers in meatpacking plants and to poor working conditions and pesticide exposures on farms are also disproportionately people of color, concerns recently amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement.Kids who walk into bodegas can buy a Twinkie product cheaper than they can buy an apple“What’s motivating me is that I think we need to really sound the alarm in America,” he says. “There are so many crises [that relate] to public health, from global warming to economic justice to humane treatment of animals. What should not be surprising is that a senator is taking this on. What should be more surprising is that we as a country have not seen this broken food system, especially after a Covid crisis, which has so exposed the fragility of the American food system. The real question is why isn’t Congress as a whole moving to address this massive threat to public health?” More

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      The Guardian view on the US Democrats: Biden seized his moment | Editorial

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      There have never been two campaign gatherings like this week’s US Democratic convention and next week’s Republican one. Stripped to their essentials by the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 conventions cannot match the energy of normal years. Yet the big speech by the presidential candidate at the convention remains a defining campaign moment, and this year is no different. The greater severity imposed by the virtual convention is also appropriate. For this is not a normal US election year. It is one in which the central contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden will define the future of the United States and the world like few others.Because of the constraints, the Democratic convention lacked true razzmatazz. In that respect it was tailor-made for Mr Biden’s decent, stubborn but markedly unexciting political message. And yet the lack of glitz had certain advantages. It meant that the nightly coverage offered to American voters this week was more serious-minded. The televised broadcasts were full of ordinary people’s video accounts of what they are going through as a result of the pandemic, recession and racism. The format also meant that Mr Biden could use his acceptance speech to cut to the chase about the issues at stake in November’s election, rather than play up the rhetoric that would have been expected in a packed hall. In any case, Barack Obama had powerfully supplied that form of oratory the previous evening.Mr Biden nevertheless delivered an effective and successful speech. He did not mention Mr Trump by name at any point. Yet everything he said in his 25-minute address was completely explicit about the profound contrast between the two candidates. America was experiencing “too much anger, too much fear, too much division”, he said. In the heart of the speech, he zeroed in on four policy crises which together define the choice voters must confront – the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, the biggest movement for racial justice since the 1960s, and the “undeniable” threat of climate change. Together, these crises faced America with a perfect storm, through which Mr Biden promised “a path of hope and light”. Such language can sound vacuous, but Mr Biden was absolutely right about the four great issues. He has also usefully cast himself as the candidate of optimism.The Democratic leader made much of his claims to be a unifier. His choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate has helped. The convention also went some way to unite this party for the task to come. There were significant speeches from defeated rivals, notably Bernie Sanders, who has rallied behind Mr Biden since the primary season ended and played his hand well during subsequent policymaking processes. Elizabeth Warren made a strong and humane contribution too. Mr Obama’s speech was a stirring reaffirmation of his belief in an American system of democracy and justice which Mr Trump has done so much to undermine and in which the faith of many natural Democrats has been deeply challenged by events including police killings. Although Mr Biden is a candidate from the heart of old Democratic politics, it is worth noting that this year’s convention had a watershed feel because it was the first for decades not dominated by the Clintons.Mr Biden will not be an inherently exciting Democratic candidate. There are good reasons for asking whether he has either the vision or the capacity to turn post-Trump America around successfully. He is instinctively happier reaching out to the middle ground than driving the new radical agenda that the times also demand. But he came through this week much better than some feared. His campaign, like his life, has shown resilience and judgment. His offer of hope and light is well crafted for such dark times. Now Mr Biden must also beat Mr Trump. Now it gets harder. The world is willing him on. More

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      in Elections

      Democratic national convention day three: Barack Obama & Kamala Harris lead speeches – watch live

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      Democrats stage the third night of their online convention after formally nominating Joe Biden as the presidential candidate for November’s election. The main speakers on Wednesday include Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi
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      in US Politics

      Veep impact: battle to be Joe Biden's running mate plays out in public

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      The presumptive Democratic nominee has said his No2 will be a woman and Warren, Abrams, Harris, Whitmer and Klobuchar lead the contenders Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris feature high on the list of Joe Biden’s potential running mates, along with Stacey Abrams, Amy Klobuchar and Gretchen Whitmer. Composite: The Guardian/THE GUARDIAN Traditionally, American presidential candidates […] More