U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's underwhelming stop in Nashville was a missed opportunity
Joining the ranks of prominent national Democrats parachuting into red parts of the country for town-hall-style pep rallies, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren popped into town last weekend to headline a buck-up-the-blue gig at Nashville's Pearl-Cohn High School gym. A crowd of 1,500 or so despairing Democrats were on hand to receive a collective transfusion of progressive gusto delivered by a skilled celebrity political phlebotomist.
Actually, the despair was already in temporary remission even before Warren took the stage, given the timing — many ventured on over to Pearl-Cohn already jazzed by the anti-everything-Trump 'Hands Off' rally in Centennial Park earlier that afternoon. Judging by the enthusiasm in the gym it's fair to assume most thought Warren's amped-up harangue on the horrors of Trump 2.0 delivered the goods, juicing some optimism that Democrats can navigate a path out of the wilderness.
I didn't come away sharing that optimism. I was more than happy to spend part of an afternoon in the company of fellow political travelers thirsty for compelling evidence that an organized opposition lives and breathes, and for a jolt of bullishness about the ability of that opposition to rescue the American experiment. It was good of Warren to give over her Saturday to flying down to the provinces to spend an hour rallying the righteous, but once she was done shouting at us I felt no more sanguine that the national party has come to grips with its own debilities than when she began – and perhaps even less so.
Here are the things that troubled me about Warren's appearance.
For starters, while the topical arc of her remarks was wide, the depth was shallow and connections to present political realities were thin. It came off largely as a rote restatement of what the Democratic party stands for on issues of economic inequality, health care, education, corruption, and climate change. It was a litany of problems framed in familiar (read: stale) ways without concrete solutions that are attainable in the present political environment.
When Warren did connect some dots to current Trump administration mayhem, the lines drawn felt simplistic. She threaded her comments with a vapidly recurring call-and-response gambit: Will cutting the Department of Education put more money in your pocket? 'No!' Will shearing veteran's benefits put more money in your pocket? 'No!'And she kept tediously circling back to her enduring bête noire, billionaires.
There are a few problems here. For one thing, while the slapdash DOGEcropping of federal bureaucracy may be feckless and pernicious, the motivation behind it is politically popular, and a good deal of it ultimately involves rearranging deck chairs, not throwing them overboard. So it is simplistic to frame these issues in all-or-nothing terms. Also, the conceit behind Warren's call-and-response is technically flawed. Actual cuts to actual federal programs (however bad an idea any particular cut may be) actually could put money in voter pockets if funneled into tax cuts. If you called out those questions in front of an audience of moderates and non-MAGA Republicans you might well get a different response, and it wouldn't be an insane one. And her billionaire obsession is a distraction. The craven fealty of many of them to Trump may be grotesque, but over the long-haul Democrats have been just as complicit as Republicans in the financialization of American democracy.
I was especially troubled by all the things that Warren didn't talk about. No discussion of immigration and culture-war issues that tanked Joe Biden's and the party's popularity over the last two years. No mention of party leadership's complicity in propping up Biden and preempting a nomination contest. And no mention of the urgent generational tensions happening right now in her party—a particularly noxious omission when the speaker is a 75-year-old third-term senator and a member in good standing of the geriatric caucus that many wish to see urgently disrupted.
And let me pile on with two quibbles.
Quibble 1: I faulted Warren above for lacking depth, but beyond that I found aspects of her remarks to border on infantilizing. She spent time and breath explaining some of the biggest issues of the day in the simplest of terms. This was an activist audience turning out to hear an out-of-state senator on a Saturday afternoon. Everyone in the room knew coming in what's bugging them about the current state of affairs, and didn't need a remedial lesson. It's as if in deciding to fly down she thought to herself 'OK, I'm heading to ignoramus-laden Tennessee so I'll need to dial down the rhetoric to hayseed.'
Sen. Elizabeth Warren played to the activist crowd but didn't discuss Democratic failures like the culture-war issues that tanked Joe Biden's popularity over the last two years, nor party leadership's complicity in preempting a nomination contest.
Quibble 2: The Warren appearance was explicitly billed as a town hall, but a town hall is an audience-question-driven conversation, not stump-speech bloviation followed by a quick handful of softball questions and cue the selfie line. In more ordinary political times I might write this off as just a bit of trifling event misbranding. But at this turbulent moment with blue America begging its hemorrhaging party to take consequential steps to get right with itself and its voters, perhaps the party might want to listen more and talk less, and be candid about that.
Is all of this too strident a critique for an event that was mainly fashioned as a get-off-the-mat pep rally? Are my expectations excessive?
I get it that these red-state road shows are intended to get Dems out there in places where they might not be expected to show up, highlight party contrasts, tap into pent-up energy among the faithful, and maybe get some press coverage along the way. Plus when thousands answer a party text or email to say yes I'll come to a high school gym to hear Elizabeth Warren, as happened here, that's a nontrivial political organizing gambit.
But I'm cranky about Warren's appearance because a political celebrity pop-in that elevates shopworn talking-point speechifying over an actual thoughtful conversation about the real problems the party faces is an occasion quickly forgotten, and rightly so. An amped up crowd filed into Pearl-Cohn's gym eager for insight into how their party is going to turn itself around, and filed out a couple of hours later with no better grasp of it than when they arrived. That's what I call a missed opportunity.
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