DNC primary + Ezra Klein and Neil Sinhibabu on Elizabeth Warren

I've been following the 2020 DNC presidential primary moderately closely, which has mostly meant watching the debates and reading FiveThirtyEight pretty consistently. Most of my friends are Warren supporters, with a few Sanders supporters and least one Gabbard supporter in the mix. I think that Elizabeth Warren is a fantastic politician and brilliant individual, but I've continued to hold off on backing a single candidate. At various points I've leaned toward Biden, Gabbard, and Warren. Booker, Klobuchar, and Sanders have also looked interesting to me as possible alternatives. Currently Warren and Sanders are my top two candidates.

My college friend Neil Sinhibabu recently wrote a blog post (https://neilsinhababu.blogspot.com/2020/01/elizabeth-warren-for-president.html) about some of his reasons for backing Warren, quoting extensively from Ezra Klein's "The Case for Elizabeth Warren" on Vox (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/15/21054083/elizabeth-warren-2020-democratic-primary). Both of these pieces really resonate for me as reasons to take Warren seriously.

From Klein's article:

"Warren is the only Democrat running for president who has built, or directly managed, a federal agency. That gives her a form of experience that is unique in the Democratic field but central to the work of the president. As my colleague Emily Stewart wrote in her excellent retrospective on Warren’s work setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “the real action in any administration is executive in nature: knowing what regulatory buttons to push, which enforcers can really go for blood, who to put where, and how to manage them.” And Warren does.

...

"Warren’s work on the CFPB gave her something rare among political candidates. One is interest in, and experience with, the federal bureaucracy itself. She understands the regulatory process, how it works, who has access to it. She knows which meetings matter, where power sits, which explanations for why something isn’t possible or isn’t happening are merely stalling tactics. She has seen, firsthand, the entry points that lobbyists and special interests use to hijack the process, the difficulties of collaboration among agencies."

The above is really, really important for me, and a framing that I hadn't heard or understood before now.

Lots of Warren-supporters talk about Warren's high competency in developing policy plans as a reason to support her for President. These arguments sound great, but I always find myself thinking, "yes, but it's not really the President's job to write policy, is it?" Klein is either making a different argument or presenting it differently. What I hear him saying very clearly here is that Warren has arguably the best qualifications for the Presidency out of the field.

This is especially important for me to hear because when I researched the credentials of the candidates, the main thing I understood was that Biden and Sanders were the only serious contenders with more than a decade of experience in national politics. Others have noted that Warren has legislative but not executive experience, which is a valid basis for concern. Talking about her work within the executive branch turns things around.

Klein goes on to give additional background on Warren's analytical credentials, and then goes on to a fairly compelling defense of Warren's approach to the single-payer healthcare question:

"Warren’s careful navigation of the Medicare-for-all debate has widely been considered a misstep for her campaign, as her admission of the political realities alienated single-payer diehards who don’t want to admit the need for any initial compromises, while her endorsement of Sanders’s underlying bill and her specificity on financing opened her up to attack from the moderates. But what’s actually happening here speaks to Warren’s strengths: She’s developed a more politically realistic proposal and path than what Sanders offered, and a more ambitious and compelling vision than what the moderates have proposed."

I'm honestly not sure which candidates have the best ideas for how to improve on our healthcare system, but Klein's words here do a great job of selling Warren's approach. If Warren is the one, we need more of this. Warren supporters, take note!

In his post, Neil Sinhibabu quotes from both of the above sections, and concludes,

"It's important to get a sense of which politicians are good at which positions. Nancy Pelosi and Jeff Merkley are great legislators. AOC has built a new kind of social media policy intellectual position around her distinctive package of skills. Bernie is the movement-father who gives voice to the voiceless and summon the AOCs from the bars of New York City to Congress.

"Elizabeth Warren should be President. Bernie is second best; Biden is the worst major Democrat; any Democrat over Trump. But Warren is the best for making executive appointments, keeping bureaucrats in line with progressive priorities, and devising a legislative strategy with Pelosi and Schumer. And that's what this job is about."

I really love the way that Neil sets up these major figures as playing together on a team. This is also great writing because it explicitly calls out important roles for other political figures, notably Sanders and Pelosi (who are sometimes painted as being at odds with each other).

Personally, I've always thought that Warren was great, and reading the above pieces have made me feel even better about the idea of a President Warren.

I'll say, though, that I'm not quite sold that she is necessarily the right nominee for 2020. A big part of the challenge is winning, and I don't think it's at all clear which of the DNC candidates would have the best shot at that. I reject the view that Biden is the most electable (although at certain points during the primary he has been my top choice because simply because I felt he was best positioned to restore previous functioning of our government). The other, challenge, though, is bringing people together once in office, and this is harder for me to sort out. Maybe it could be Biden, who seems to make older voters feel comfortable (a lot of my friends really don't like him). Maybe it could be Sanders, who taps into bipartisan anti-establishment impulses (a lot of my friends really don't like *him*). Maybe it could be Klobuchar, who has demonstrated electoral success in "red" parts of the country (*I* don't particularly like her, but if we need to choose a moderate, I think she has the sharpest rhetoric; I don't feel great about Klobuchar's ability to bring in non-white Americans though, so that's a challenge).

Or maybe it could be Warren, who used to be a Republican, and who has Republicans in her family, so probably has some good ideas about how to talk to members of both parties. I have at least one friend who is kind of concerned about her rhetoric, though, and I can't say that I'm sure that he's wrong. Her high level of education comes through, and while this feels very comfortable to me, I've been told it can be alienating for a lot of Americans. But today I feel better about the idea that she has the skills to take on the core responsibilities of the presidency.

Today is the Iowa Caucus, and polling points to Sanders and Biden as the most likely to win. There's a good chance that the media will get to have fun analyzing the results because there are three different ways of looking at who the "real" winner is (see: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-iowas-three-different-votes-could-affect-who-wins/).

We're still early in the primary though. We will see what happens next.