The Des Moines Register’s endorsement this weekend of Sen. Elizabeth Warren for the 2020 Iowa caucuses carefully sidesteps her many personal failings, creating for the reader an impression of the lawmaker that simply does not match reality.
You do not accomplish that by accident. You have to work hard to avoid the senator’s falsehoods, flip-flops, and ethical disasters.
“Unifying the country may not be possible, but to gain the support required to govern, she must show that her vision will lift people up rather than divide them,” the paper’s editorial board claims in its endorsement. “Warren’s competence, respect for others and status as the nation’s first female president would be a fitting response to the ignorance, sexism and xenophobia of the Trump Oval Office.”
It adds, “She is a thinker, a policy wonk and a hard worker. She remembers her own family’s struggles to make ends meet and her own desperation as a working mother needing child care. She cares about people, and she will use her seemingly endless energy and passion to fight for them.”
Warren, the board claims, would “treat truth as something that matters,” unlike the “current occupant of the White House.”
“At this moment,” the endorsement concludes, “when the very fabric of American life is at stake, Elizabeth Warren is the president this nation needs.”
Uh-huh.
First, it is astounding that the board’s endorsement omits all mentions of Medicare for All, Warren’s multitrillion-dollar healthcare plan. It was supposed to be the crown jewel of her policy proposals. The closest the Des Moines Register’s board comes to acknowledging her once-touted plan, which she has stopped talking about altogether following a series of difficult questions and criticisms, is when it writes, “While the board has long supported single-payer health insurance, it believes a gradual transition is the more realistic approach. But Warren is pushing in the right direction.”
Are we going to ignore the part where she has struggled to say how she plans to fund Medicare for All, or the fact that she has stopped promoting it on the campaign trail? Apparently so!
More seriously, this speaks to the bigger issue of the endorsement, which is this: What it says is not as interesting as what it does not say.
The endorsement does not say, for example, that Warren was caught recently in a lie of omission when she shot back at a pro-school choice protester in Atlanta, claiming, “My children went to public schools.” Her children also went to private schools. The Des Moines Register’s editorial board makes no mention of Warren’s false claim of Native American heritage.
There is also no mention anywhere in the editorial of the legitimate questions that have been raised about Warren’s dubious claim that her parents were forced to elope because her mother was part Cherokee. The board also avoids mentioning that the senator’s claim that she was fired from her job as a teacher in the 1970s for being “visibly pregnant” was proven false by a written record. The editorial board makes no mention of Warren’s ultradivisive rhetoric, including when she called Fox News a “hate-for-profit racket” or the time she blamed it for a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.
These details go ignored in favor of the claim that “Warren will push an unequal America in the right direction.”
Perhaps, if you are naive enough to believe what she is selling.
