Elizabeth Warren published a book called Persist. She said it’s not a campaign bio, but that’s how it goes with politicians. Persist is, of course, a campaign bio. Warren tells her story through chapters on her own roles in life – a mother, teacher, planner, fighter, learner, and woman. As with her campaign itself, Warren organizes the book around a tight theme. Warren builds Persist around a broader policy vision.
In this post, I’ll take a look at Warren’s book, building on some of the points in my own eBook on the Warren campaign.
Warren at Her Best: A Mother and a Fighter
Warren did a great job fighting for policies that benefit women. Persist brings out again how well she combines these things. In the book, she offers really compelling reasons from her own story as a mother for why the public should cover child care. Lack of affordable child care forced Warren to rework her career multiple times. Along the way, she lost a job as a teacher that she seemed to genuinely enjoy.
Warren first rose to national prominence in part on the strength of her ‘blood and teeth’ quote. Warren was fighting for a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In doing so, she said: “My first choice is a strong consumer agency. My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.”
That is what people liked about Warren. It garnered for her a great deal of credibility and support. Some even argued that her failure to follow up on this explains why she lost in 2020. ‘Blood and teeth’ might have won the Democratic nomination and defeated Trump.
Warren reprises the quote in Persist when she discussed Michael Bloomberg. As many readers probably recall, Warren attacked Bloomberg during the February 2020 Democratic debate. And once again, this all stands out as one of the most compelling parts of Warren’s story.
Warren hits her stride when she combines her personal story with her stance as a fighter.
Warren at Her Worst: A Planner
And then Warren’s at her worst when she gets bogged down in policy details at the expense of a broader vision. Often she delves into the details of progressive policy solutions that have simpler, more popular social democratic versions. We find this most often in the chapter she calls ‘a planner.’ In that chapter, she touts her ‘plans’ and chides other candidates because they don’t have ‘plans.’
But when she says ‘plans,’ Warren often has little in mind beyond ‘legislative proposals.’ However, all serious presidential candidates have ‘plans’ in that sense. Some of her opponents had plans that were less detailed. However, often her opponents had plans that were just as good, and at the same time less convoluted and more widely supported.
And so, there’s nothing wrong with having plans. The trouble is that Warren never really moved beyond the kinds of ‘plans’ better suited to someone doing the job of a senator than running for president. Meanwhile, some of Warren’s plans just aren’t very good. Her funding plans routinely placed popular policy at the mercy of billionaires. When only billionaires pay for a program, they wield greater influence over the benefits the program provides.
Warren often passes up social democratic ideas in favor of worse progressive ideas. Or she adopts social democratic ideas without getting at why they’re good.
An Example: Housing
We found that latter point most clearly with her (initial) support for Medicare for All. But it also stands out in her housing policy ideas.
Housing vouchers are the best example of a progressive housing policy. In a voucher program, the government provides low-income tenants with a voucher to find housing on the private market. The tenant pays a portion of their income to the landlord. And then the government pays the rest of the rent.
This hits all the progressive policy goals. Vouchers provide a great deal of assistance to tenants. And it does so without disrupting profit. Indeed, it even provides income stability to many landlords. It also artificially boosts the low-income housing market, allowing developers to earn higher profits by building more expensive housing. Social democrats and socialists, of course, criticize the program because it doesn’t address the underlying housing problem: the fact that it’s a privately owned system.
But in Persist, Warren argues against vouchers. Instead, she supports public housing – a social democratic idea, not a progressive one. However, in doing so, Warren never quite leaves conventional economic thinking behind. She argues for public housing on the grounds that it will increase housing supply, thereby reducing the price of housing via relations of supply and demand.
The problem here is that supply isn’t the core issue with U.S. housing. The core issue is ownership, specifically that most of our housing is on the private market. Only through public ownership – particularly mixed-income public housing – will we ever put a serious downward pressure on housing prices. We’ll also save a great deal of money over extremely expensive voucher programs.
Thus, even when Warren advocates for social democratic ideas, she falls back on progressive economics. This is why she often abandons social democratic ideas such as M4A.
Persist: Why Warren Lost
In the final chapter of Persist – ‘a woman’ – Warren addresses her 2020 loss for the Democratic nomination. She doesn’t lay out a specific thesis, which is fine. I think she wants to leave the door open. She does, however, strongly suggest that media coverage of her ‘electability‘ played a large role. Her placement of this discussion also suggests she sees gender as a major factor.
I’ve covered this before, and I won’t rehash. I focused on Warren’s mishandling of health care and M4A, and Warren acknowledges this as a factor. But I focused on that issue mostly because it was one Warren could control. In fact, the most important reason Warren lost – at least in my view – was a mundane one. In the primaries, Warren faced two candidates with universal name recognition and a built-in base: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Anyone not named Biden or Sanders would’ve struggled.
As far as the press and electability go, Warren had good press for most of the campaign. And her campaign did an effective job addressing gender issues. If gender harmed Warren’s campaign – as I said elsewhere – it was because it influenced her campaign strategy in ways that harmed her candidacy.
