“We’re only days away from the biggest fundraising deadline of the year, and we’re at risk of missing our $20 million goal”, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign said, in a prominent pop-up window on the official website Saturday.
The message is accompanied by a progress bar that makes it look like $17 million is so far from $20 million that if you were sitting on the former, you couldn’t even fathom the latter.
“So far this quarter, we’ve raised a little over $17 million”, an e-mail to supporters reads. “That’s a good chunk behind where we were at this time last quarter”.
Like Bernie Sanders, Warren has eschewed big-money fundraisers. In Q3, each raised around $25 million (Warren $24.6 and Bernie $25.3).
News that the senator’s fundraising haul has fallen off by around 30% was greeted with a nauseatingly chippy “article” on CNBC’s cartoonish website. The network swears the piece has been “trending” for 24 straight hours (it’s been perched at the top of the “TRENDING NOW” list on the site’s sidebar pretty much since it first appeared on Friday morning).
As usual, CNBC’s coverage of Warren is just Fox News without the outright libel and slander. The network habitually paints Warren as a kind of thieving rascal-witch hell-bent on undermining prosperity.
The network’s pro-billionaire propaganda reached an absurd pinnacle last month, when Scott Wapner watched Leon Cooperman literally cry on air. “I care”, Leon sobbed. “I care”. Wapner nearly cried with him.
Even the normally credible John Harwood’s interview with Warren was poisoned with gotcha questions and thinly-veiled derision.
“The dip in fundraising… comes after she escalated her attacks on billionaires and wealthy donors”, CNBC chided on Friday, in a ridiculous excuse for journalism, this time perpetrated by Brian Schwartz. “She has accused rival Mike Bloomberg of trying to buy the Democratic nomination, while she has gotten into public spats with Wall Street titans such as Leon Cooperman and Lloyd Blankfein”, Schwartz continued, implicitly suggesting that telling the truth about billionaires is a self-evidently bad thing for someone to be doing.
To be clear, we are naturally predisposed towards favoring a progressive agenda for two very simple reasons:
- Universal healthcare, education and cleaning up the environment are objectively noble goals
- No critic of modern monetary theory (often floated as a way to pay for the progressive agenda) that we’re aware of has offered a convincing argument for why, precisely, it cannot work. Simply saying it “shouldn’t” work because it offends your fiscal sensibilities isn’t even close to sufficient when it comes to dismissing a theory, especially at a time when America is borrowing from China to fund “Space Force”, trillions in tax cuts and bailouts for farmers hurt by a quixotic trade war with that very same China. Further, allusions to Weimar are the worst kind of cop out – if you’re inclined to accept that kind of fearmongering and call the matter closed, then you’d probably be inclined to accept any kind of argument which rules out one thing based on a tangentially-related historical episode representing the worst-case scenario. I can conjure an infinite number of societal advances that kind of “logic” would have ruled out ahead of time.
But, even if you’re not predisposed to being open-minded, do yourself a favor and don’t get your Elizabeth Warren news from CNBC, because that’s about like relying on Iranian state media for the latest on Israel or KCNA for the latest scoops on US politics.
After briefly closing the gap on Joe Biden, Warren’s poll numbers have slipped.
These things wax and wane (that’s what polls do) and it’s still far too early to say, with any degree of confidence, how it will pan out. But it appears Americans became less enthusiastic about the senator’s bid for the Oval Office after getting a closer look at her Medicare for All plan.
Around two weeks after presenting the details about how she intends to fund it, Warren penned a lengthy “gradual implementation” plan which offered a less aggressive approach, possibly in a bid to avoid rattling voters worried that a sweeping overhaul on “day one” (figuratively speaking, of course) would be wholly disruptive. Although many observers blame her slide on the health care proposal, her numbers were actually falling before that.
(Summary of Dems proposals via Deutsche Bank)
“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important: Will you chip in $3 now to help hit our campaign’s end-of-quarter fundraising goal?”, Warren asked, in a Friday evening Twitter post. “This is a critical time to invest in Iowa and other states before voting and caucusing start, and we can only do it together!”, she added.
Apparently, if you “call now” (so to speak), she’ll send you a “Tax the Ultra-Rich” sticker.
You’re encouraged to get one, affix it to your forehead and then take a tour of CNBC’s studios, where a conservative “snowflake” melts away into their $8 latte every time someone mentions the letters “A”, “O” and “C” in the same breath.
I see the decline in Warrens polls directly related to the awakening that she was the candidate to beat. I follow the alt right propaganda outlets closely. I also note changes in editorial slant in various social pages. The alt right propaganda sites started the propaganda campaign against Warren around the beginning of Oct, maybe a little before. The propaganda message made its way to numerous more “reputable” sites/social pages in November. In particular, yahoo and yahoo Finance did a 180% on its Warren editorial slant, peddling the anti-Warren propaganda as legitimate news pieces. Yes, a lot of people are ignorant enough to fall for this simple trick.