Elizabeth Warren, Insult Comic
Warren’s focus, speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, was on the seventy per cent of college students who have to take out loans: “The interest rate on these student loans makes billions and billions of dollars for the United States government,” she said. But her real point was, more mundanely, the refusal of more than three Republicans to support a bill she had sponsored that would have allowed student debtors to refinance their loans at forgiving rates. It was the “Republican philosophy in a nutshell,” she said, to favor those seeking to preserve their capital over ordinary people who wanted to get ahead. “The game is rigged,” Warren said, “and the Republicans rigged it.”
.. The image of the rigged game was, after the 2008 financial crisis, Warren’s more than anyone’s, and there was a specificity to it: she was talking about the protections that the banks enjoyed. But in the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary, Bernie Sanders adopted it, more abstractly, to refer to the ways in which life is made difficult for ordinary people, and then Donald Trump began to use it, often to hint that the election was about to be stolen from him.
.. no comedian has developed a convincing caricature of Warren
.. Warren is not a utopian but a leveller, a soldier of comeuppance and retribution.
.. The G.O.P. establishment’s case is that if voters are discontented with their lot, economically and socially, then they should blame liberals and Democrats, who have held cultural and Presidential power for most of the past quarter century. The Democratic response in recent years has been a version of Warren’s response—that the problem was a profoundly rigged economic system that progressive politics have only begun to correct.