“This Man Is Dangerous” – Liz Warren On Trump, The Street’s “Fearless Girl” & Why Clinton Lost

No one ever accused Heisenberg of being an unbiased political observer.

Wait, actually that’s not true. A lot of people have tried to ascribe “unbiased” to Heisenberg.

And that’s amusing. It’s a reflection of what happens when you’re honest with people. In short: they hate it. Because being honest effectively short-circuits people’s ability to throw tomatoes.

I’ve said repeatedly that this site is biased and that the author(s) has/have an agenda. But it’s not a shameless clickbait agenda. And it’s not a profit-linked agenda. The HR agenda, rather, is simple: to provide what we feel is an accurate (if critical and often cynical) take on politics and markets.

And although we’re completely upfront about our political biases, some readers persist with this: “this post does nothing to support your contention of being an unbiased observer.”

Well, we never said we were “unbiased.” In fact, we said exactly the opposite. But it’s hard to criticize someone who admits to being biased up front. And not because you can’t criticize bias, but rather because it’s pretty damn maddening to try and claim that someone is hiding their inherent biases when that same someone constantly reminds you that they’re biased. Fun stuff, right?

With that said, I/we like Elizabeth Warren – a lot. Every time she does or says anything you kind of want to shout: “Get ’em Liz!”

Indeed, we’d suggest that one of the most spectacular backfires in the history of politics came when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided it was a good idea to force Warren to stop reading from a 1986 letter penned by Coretta Scott King.

Now you’d think that McConnell would have immediately realized that effectively silencing the voice of a Civil Rights icon was bound to come back and bite him on the ass, but not only did he not realize it, he even served up a softball to Democrats by saying this:

Sen. Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.

That was so obviously amenable to being turned into a veritable Democratic battle cry that’s it’s hard to fathom how McConnell didn’t stop himself from phrasing it that way, but whatever the case, it went horribly awry for the GOP almost immediately. To wit:

She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted. pic.twitter.com/ebXJRX23Re

— Marc (@MarcSnetiker) February 8, 2017

Well anyway, now old Mitch won’t even speak to Warren (literally) as if it’s somehow her fault that he did something strategically stupid, but thankfully Warren still has no trouble speaking to anybody which means we get great quotables like those excerpted below from an interview with USA Today which we proudly present with all the maddening political bias that makes writing these posts so much fun for us, and so maddening for some readers.

Via USA Today

Warren, who has stood up to her own angry bulls on Wall Street over banking regulations and taxpayer bailouts, mocks complaints by the sculptor of the iconic Charging Bull in lower Manhattan that the addition last month of a sculpture of a defiant girl, hands on her hips and standing in his path, should be removed.

“O-o-h, o-o-h, o-o-h, that is so-o-o sad,” Warren says in a mocking voice, then adds: “I think the Fearless Girl is terrific. I hope she stands there until the bull falls over.”

Fight like a girl. pic.twitter.com/qGTn46jS9W

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 18, 2017

At 67, Warren has a direct manner and a no-nonsense mien. She parries a question about whether she has any regrets about not running in 2016.

“Oh, I regret that Donald Trump is president of the United States, full stop, right there,” she says. “I wish that he weren’t. But now he is and we’ve just got to go forward.”

She declines to speculate on whether she could have won the Democratic nomination last year if she had run. Or if she could have defeated Trump in November if she had been nominated. Or if Sanders, an ideological ally, would have been a more formidable opponent in the general election than Clinton proved to be.

“I don’t know; I don’t know, and it’s again, we are where we are,” she says. “Donald Trump has only been here, not even 100 days yet – God, it’s like dog years or something, it feels like so much has gone on. We’ve got to get focused on what we’re going to do in the next week, in the next month. This man is truly dangerous.”

She says Clinton lost because beleaguered middle-class and working-class voters didn’t believe that she was the candidate most committed to fighting for their families. “Where it mattered in the vote tally, where America had been hit extra hard by lost jobs and declining opportunities, our side hadn’t closed the deal,” Warren writes. “Shame on us.”

Who’s “us?”

“All of us. The Democrats. We didn’t make the case,” she says in the interview. Including Clinton? “Sure. I mean, it’s all of us. We have to bear responsibility for that. … We didn’t get out there and fight hard enough.”

She has been heartened by the massive Women’s March in Washington, Boston and elsewhere the day after Trump’s inauguration, and by the enthusiasm of Democratic voters in special House elections last week in Kansas and Tuesday in Georgia. But she says the risk for Democrats is not staying focused.

“On the one hand, you’ve got to be in the fight, but … you can’t shoot at everything that moves,” she says. “Did you see the movie Up? Donald Trump is the guy [actually, it was a dog] who yells ‘Squirrel!’ and everybody runs off in another direction. We cannot engage Donald Trump on every crazy 3 AM tweet. We cannot engage every time he says some goofball thing or calls some foreign leader. You’ve got to kind of pick your shots – even though he’s everywhere, all the time – and really fight back on the things that matter.”