A New Liberal Lion(ess)

American humorist Will Rogers once famously declared, “I’m not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” Nearly 80 years after Rogers’ death, the Democratic Party still suffers from a seemingly congenital inability to act in a cohesive manner. Whether it is the months-long slog to corral enough moderate Democrat votes to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in late 2009 and early 2010, or whether it is the initial resistance among Senate Democrats to President Obama’s American Jobs Act in September, congressional Democratic infighting and handwringing has become a staple of American political life. Perhaps it is emblematic, then, that even the movement that aspires to revive the political fortunes of American liberalism—Occupy Wall Street—is hampered by debilitating incoherence. A potential solution to longstanding liberal political dysfunction, however, presents itself in Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren, which is why we strongly endorse her candidacy for the United States Senate.

Warren, due to a professional lifetime of middle class advocacy spent outside the corrosive scope of professional politics, has demonstrated time and again an almost-reckless fearlessness that enables her to make a forceful and unequivocal case for economic fairness. This fearlessness was best demonstrated by her now famous assertion that “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces the rest of us paid for.”

Republicans have attempted to dismiss Warren’s rhetoric as divisive “class warfare,” as seen by a recent, unintentionally self-parodic ad run by the Massachusetts Republican Party reframing Warren’s rhetorical differentiation between “you” and “the rest of us” as a differentiation between “job creators” (a.k.a. the rich) and…well, they never do give the “the rest of us” a nickname. But as demonstrated by President Obama, whose rhetoric of late has come to resemble Warren’s more and more, the best way to counter the Republicans’ specious accusations of class warfare is to embrace them. As the president said, “I'm a warrior for the middle class; I'm happy to fight for working people. Because the only class warfare I've seen is the battle that's been waged against the middle class in this country for a decade.”

The clarity and passion of Warren’s rhetoric is reinforced by her expertise in consumer protection as a longtime law professor specializing in contracts, bankruptcy, and commercial law, as the intellectual architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as chair of the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s Congressional Oversight Panel, and as a special advisor charged with implementing the CFPB following its establishment by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Her intellectual heft, coupled with hands-on experience, would give her the ability to harness the amorphous rage of the Occupy Wall Street movement and channel it into constructive advocacy for the middle class as a United States senator. Therefore, two years into the Wall Street-coddling tenure of sitting Massachusetts Senator Scott P. Brown, whose woes have recently been compounded by fresh allegations of plagiarism on his campaign website, we firmly believe that Warren would be the better steward of the legacy of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56.