Elizabeth Warren: 'Fearless' foe against a charging Donald Trump?
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Count Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as a friend of the Fearless Girl.
Warren, who has stood up to her own angry bulls on Wall Street over banking regulations and taxpayer bailouts, mocks complaints by the sculptor of the iconic Charging Bull in lower Manhattan that the addition last month of a sculpture of a defiant girl, hands on her hips and standing in his path, should be removed.
"O-o-h, o-o-h, o-o-h, that is so-o-o sad," Warren says in a mocking voice, then adds: "I think the Fearless Girl is terrific. I hope she stands there until the bull falls over."
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Warren casts herself as a fearless champion of progressive causes against the charging bull that is President Trump. In This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class, published Tuesday by Metropolitan Books, she argues the federal government needs to do much more to reverse decades of decline among the nation's working families, from raising the minimum wage to expanding aid to education.
She initially assumed the book would be a friendly spur to the left for a president named Hillary Clinton, viewed by some liberals as an uncertain ally on such issues as trade.
Then Donald Trump won the White House.
"Look, I started this book probably 15 years ago, because it's the big story about building a middle class and then tearing it down, and why it happened, and how it happened," Warren said in an interview with Capital Download, USA TODAY's video newsmaker series. "And, sure, for much of the time that I was working on it, I thought it would be Hillary Clinton in the White House. I thought it would be important that she be able to see that arc and that, you know, some good, strong opportunities available for the things she would be able to do, and the team she would put together would be able to do."
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Now Trump's unexpected victory has given Warren's message a more apocalyptic edge. Her plan to bolster the case for progressive policies in a Democratic administration has been turned into a rallying cry against the economic and social proposals of a Republican one. "The direction that Donald Trump and his team want to drive this country is a direction that I don't think America's middle class can survive," she warns.
It also has opened a world of political possibility for the senior senator from Massachusetts, heir to the seat long held by Democratic icon Ted Kennedy. Supporters urged her to seek the party's presidential nod in 2016, and the suggestion that she just might fueled speculation and irked Clinton's team. In the end, Warren didn't run but she also didn't endorse either Clinton or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders until the nomination effectively was settled.
In her new book, she says she resisted "a lot of pressure" to back Clinton. Her husband, Harvard law professor Bruce Mann, cautioned her that the race would be "pretty terrible" although he also assured her it would be okay with him if she decided to run. "My heart wasn't in it," she writes.
In an interview at her Cambridge home, Warren says she never felt the time was right. She had been a law professor and bankruptcy expert who became a leading advocate of consumer protections, especially in the wake of the financial meltdown in 2008. The campaign that ousted Republican senator Scott Brown in 2012 had been her first bid for public office.
"So, you know, people started asking me about this right after I got elected, and my first thought was, really? Are you kidding me? I kind of think you need more experience before you run for president of the United States," she says. "But I was also really learning the job of the Senate, and figuring out what I could do, what the tools were and how you could expand them and use them."
It the end, it wasn't a close call, she says. "Not so much."
'IT IS MY PLAN'
Warren is running for re-election to the Senate next year, a race now rated by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report as so solidly Democratic that the contest isn't expected to be competitive. Even so, her campaign already has reported raising more than $9.2 million.
Her focus is on that campaign, she says. Of course, if she wins a second Senate term she will have more of the experience she says she lacked in 2016 for a White House run.
Will she promise Bay State voters that she'll serve all six years of a second term? "So that's certainly my plan," she replies.
Not exactly a Shermanesque denial, the interviewer notes.
Warren, famed for frustrating reporters with her discipline for staying on message, declines to go any further the second time around: "It is my plan."
She putters in the kitchen of the cozy, cluttered home she and her husband have lived in for a quarter-century. She fixes herself a banana milkshake in a blender; Mann comes in the side door after running an errand. The adjacent sunroom features a white wicker swing that once hung on the porch of her grandparents' home in Wetumka, Okla, and the wicker rocking chair that she sat in to write this book and her 2014 autobiography, A Fighting Chance, on her laptop computer.
Sen. Warren's candid attitude fuels her rise
At 67, Warren has a direct manner and a no-nonsense mien. She parries a question about whether she has any regrets about not running in 2016.
"Oh, I regret that Donald Trump is president of the United States, full stop, right there," she says. "I wish that he weren't. But now he is and we've just got to go forward."
She declines to speculate on whether she could have won the Democratic nomination last year if she had run. Or if she could have defeated Trump in November if she had been nominated. Or if Sanders, an ideological ally, would have been a more formidable opponent in the general election than Clinton proved to be.
"I don't know; I don't know, and it's again, we are where we are," she says. "Donald Trump has only been here, not even 100 days yet — God, it's like dog years or something, it feels like so much has gone on. We've got to get focused on what we're going to do in the next week, in the next month. This man is truly dangerous.
She says Clinton lost because beleaguered middle-class and working-class voters didn't believe that she was the candidate most committed to fighting for their families. "Where it mattered in the vote tally, where America had been hit extra hard by lost jobs and declining opportunities, our side hadn't closed the deal," Warren writes. "Shame on us."
Who's "us?"
"All of us. The Democrats. We didn't make the case," she says in the interview. Including Clinton? "Sure. I mean, it's all of us. We have to bear responsibility for that. ... We didn't get out there and fight hard enough."
She has been heartened by the massive Women's March in Washington, Boston and elsewhere the day after Trump's inauguration, and by the enthusiasm of Democratic voters in special House elections last week in Kansas and Tuesday in Georgia. But she says the risk for Democrats is not staying focused.
"On the one hand, you've got to be in the fight, but ... you can't shoot at everything that moves," she says. "Did you see the movie Up? Donald Trump is the guy [actually, it was a dog] who yells 'Squirrel!' and everybody runs off in another direction. We cannot engage Donald Trump on every crazy 3 AM tweet. We cannot engage every time he says some goofball thing or calls some foreign leader. You've got to kind of pick your shots — even though he's everywhere, all the time — and really fight back on the things that matter."
LET'S MAKE A DEAL?
For Warren, "the things that matter" would include fighting White House efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act, even if Republicans are unable to pass legislation to repeal and replace President Obama's signature health care initiative. Trump has suggested he might halt government subsidies to insurance companies that help control costs for low-income consumers.
"He's trying to give it a shove into a death spiral, and that is where I think we draw the line right now and have that fight with him," she says. Some Democrats have proposed tying a commitment to continue the subsidies to the spending bill that must pass by the end of next week to avoid a government shutdown.
And for all her differences with Trump, Warren challenges him to join him in a proposal both have endorsed: Restoring a version of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated retail banking from investment banking and trading. The measure, passed during the New Deal and repealed in 1999, is designed to prevent banks from taking risks with federally insured deposits.
"Donald Trump said during the campaign that he would break up the big banks, that he believed in Glass-Steagall. He put it into the Republican platform," Warren says in a voice that can only be described as taunting. "Come on, Donald Trump! Let's do it!"
