Populist Warren could rewrite American politics
12/19/14

The word on Elizabeth Warren - the Democratic Massachusetts senator who fomented the opposition last week to a rollback of financial regulations in the bill funding the government - is that she's the left's answer to shut-'em-down Ted Cruz. In a recent Washington Post column, Dana Milbank concluded that Warren is more like former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, the Republican ideologue who left his elective office to better lead the far right to glory.

These assessments miss one crucial difference between Warren and the right-wingers: She has crossover appeal. More importantly, so does Warrenism.

Cruz and DeMint can claim no allies within what remains of moderate Republican ranks. Warren's war on Wall Street, by contrast, has enlisted colleagues on the right flank of the Democratic Party.

Although 20 Democratic senators joined Warren last weekend in voting against the funding bill as a way to protest its allowing publicly insured banks to trade risky derivatives, five colleagues joined her in the more emphatic gesture of voting against the cloture motion that brought the bill to a vote. They were three staunch progressives - Ohio's Sherrod Brown, Minnesota's Al Franken and Vermont's Bernie Sanders (an independent) - and two senators generally considered among the party's more conservative lawmakers: West Virginia's Joe Manchin III and Missouri's Claire McCaskill.

By the metric of social issues, the "more conservative" label fits those two. Unlike his Democratic colleagues, Manchin voted Monday against confirming Vivek Murthy as surgeon general to register his displeasure with Murthy's advocacy of stricter gun control, a position that runs counter not just to Manchin's beliefs but also to those of his West Virginia constituents. But when it came to rescinding regulations on Wall Street, Manchin and McCaskill were among Warren's firmest allies.

At a time when Democrats are still dissecting the double disaster of last month's midterm elections - losing working-class whites to Republicans in record numbers, and failing to motivate sufficient numbers of young and minority voters, the party's base, to go to the polls - the Warren-Manchin concord suggests that there's a way to reassemble the elusive emerging Democratic majority. Manchin represents the state with one of the nation's highest share of working-class whites. Economic populism is alive and well in such states, as evidenced by the enthusiastic receptions that Warren received when she campaigned for Senate candidates in Southern states....

http://www.theday.com/article/20141219/OP03/312199978