Wow

Not many political candidates leave me speechless, but upon reading this today, all I could say was Wow. I kept saying Wow for several minutes thereafter.

Wall Street's long knives are out for this woman. My guess is she's got the Blue Dogs and DINOs who run the Democratic National Committee shitting their pants, too. I really wish she had not immediately rocketed up the polls to lead Brown. That gives the motherfuckers way too much time to stop her.

Rumproast:

"I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No!

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear.

You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.

You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.

You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.

You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

David Atkins "thereisnospoon" at Hullabaloo:

Changing the system won't come from dropping out and voting third party, nor will it come from blindly defending the Administration and hoping a Republican never holds the White House again in our lifetime. Changing the system will come from voting people like Elizabeth Warren into office all across the country, proving that they can win using this sort of rhetoric, and then holding them accountable to their campaign promises.

And here's the little secret the Democratic consultant class either doesn't understand or willfully refuses to understand: this sort of rhetoric won't just win in Massachusetts. It will win in Omaha, too. It will win the day from Annapolis to Anchorage, from Kalamazoo to Kailua-Kona.

Will there be places this message won't win, and voters whose heartstrings it won't touch? Yes, of course. Most of those places will be heavily rural or bastions of the Bible Belt and the Deep South. But those places were unwinnable and those people unreachable anyway without destroying everything the Democratic Party is supposed to stand for.

The amount of contortion necessary for Democrats to win in places Warren's message won't work means those places aren't worth winning in the first place.

The Democratic Party would be far, far better off maximizing voter turnout in places where this message does work, than in weakening its message so much that its support becomes a mile wide but an inch deep.

Most importantly, if the Democratic Party were to elect a bevy of candidates who talked this talk and then walked the walk while in office, the Party would actually succeed in moving economic policy significantly to the left while in power, and in stopping the Rightist juggernaut when eventually forced into the minority. It would actually do the job not just of getting elected, but of actually doing the things they were elected to do, which is the whole point of politics. Yes, it might lose some Wall St. cash in the process. But if that's the overriding concern, it's only a matter of time before violent revolution or totalitarian takeover anyway. So there's not much to lose, anyway.

I heard Elizabeth Warren speak on campus a few months ago, and I worried about her candidacy because in that speech she was a little too wonkish even for an academic audience.

I'm not worried anymore.