[Rather than obsess over who Warren will endorse, let’s see
Biden and Sanders lift up her ideas and principles]
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THE ELIZABETH WARREN EXAMPLE   [[link removed]]

 

Jamil Smith
March 6, 2020
Rolling Stone
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_ Rather than obsess over who Warren will endorse, let’s see Biden
and Sanders lift up her ideas and principles _

Sen. Elizabeth Warren before delivering a campaign speech at East Los
Angeles College on March 2, 2020 in Monterey Park, California, Mario
Tama/Getty Images

 

In the immediate wake of someone suspending her or his campaign, both
our elected officials and we in the press who cover them focus too
acutely on the question of endorsements. It is an ugly, gossipy trend
that distorts the very purpose of public service, placing more
emphasis on what candidates can do for one another rather than what
they can do for the voters. With the urgency of full bladders, pundits
immediately pivot to asking who the fallen contender will support —
and fans of the frontrunners go online to make their voices heard.

Then the laudatory goodbyes begin. If the lionizing soundbites or
tweets come from the front-runners or their surrogates, well, put a
little extra sugar on top: They’re meant to woo into the very
endorsements I just mentioned. Some are so saccharine, even, that they
make you wonder why they didn’t vote for her in the first place. 

This all can be particularly rancid when the specters of identity and
exclusion loom. Yes, Tulsi Gabbard remains. But if we are to speak of
the last realistic chance women had at the presidency in 2020, it
left with 
[[link removed]]Elizabeth
Warren [[link removed]] on
Thursday. The withdrawals of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten
Gillibrand, Julián Castro, and most recently Amy Klobuchar surely
still sting for their most ardent supporters. But Warren’s
departure
[[link removed]], being
the last viable female candidacy and leaving two septuagenarian white
men to contend for the Democratic nomination, should be a particularly
distressful coda for us all. The incumbent president has made this a
quite literally viral moment
[[link removed]],
spotlighting anew in the last couple weeks the value of competency
and expertise in the White House
[[link removed]]. 

This upcoming January, for the 59th consecutive time, the United
States will fail to inaugurate a woman as president. The young girls
at Warren’s campaign stops with whom she made “pinky promises”
[[link removed]] that
they, too, would one day run for president must keep imagining that it
is possible. However, that does not mean that we, as a country, should
settle for leadership without a woman’s ideas and example. And just
because a woman like Warren (or Harris, or Gillibrand, or Klobuchar)
has left the race, that doesn’t necessarily mean that her many
proposals should. 

So rather than considering Warren’s endorsement of the two remaining
men, Joe Biden
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in a manner of speaking they should endorse her. In a
recent _TIME _interview, Charlotte Alter asked Warren how she’d
feel if either of the two frontrunning (male) competitors at the time
won the nomination, but adopted her now-legendarily detailed and
voluminous plans. “Are you kidding? Fabulous!” Warren responded.
“I think the question you’re asking me is, ‘If the things you
want to get done actually get done, will your heart be broken?’ And
the answer is, ‘No! I’ll lead the parade!’”

Biden and Sanders should be the drum majors. In celebrating Warren’s
ideas, and, by extension, what her policies and approach to politics
represented in this race, they would both do themselves a service and
the nation. This isn’t about reverence for Warren. She had her
faults, some of which I wrote about
[[link removed]] — and
to her credit, she attempted to make amends
[[link removed]].
But rather than obsessing over endorsements, I’d rather encourage
you to turn your gaze away from what she can do for Bernie and Joe and
put it back onto how she can still help the American people and make
the country better. 

First, many of Warren’s plans would fill holes for both Biden and
Sanders. There is no chance that I could encapsulate here all of those
that may help both men, but there are a few easy items to pick right
from the start. 

Both men should take a cue from Warren on her combative language
[[link removed]] and
how she used identity to break free from antiquated modes of thinking.
In her Monday rally prior to Super Tuesday here in Los Angeles,
Warren spoke
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a heavily Latinx-crowd of thousands about janitors fighting gender and
racial discrimination before and as they organized for union rights:
“So we can get timid. We can cower. Or we can fight back like the
Latina janitors of a generation ago. Me, I’m fighting back. Fighting
back is an act of patriotism.” This was an event where most knew how
the next day’s election would go. But pointing to a history of
resistance within a marginalized community, rather than to herself, as
a symbol of toughness should provide a model for Biden
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both of whom could stand to be more sensitive on this front.

Though Warren’s campaign took some heat for not appealing
effectively
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black voters, she made appealing to black women an early and
principal focus [[link removed]].
There is no reason why both men, who have reasonable arguments for
being competitive in the fall, should not begin making policy-oriented
pitches to black communities. Her “Working Agenda for Black
America”
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comprehensive, but explicable solutions that not only improve on what
both Biden and Sanders offer our communities at the moment, but
explain precisely how she’d get each of her items accomplished.
(Biden doesn’t have a separate plan for black Americans, but
as Michael Harriot
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weaves some decent solutions into his overall platform
[[link removed]]; Sanders’s plan for racial
justice [[link removed]] offers
elementary, bullet-pointed solutions and details by comparison.)

The senator from Vermont should take a cue from how Warren spoke about
gun violence, considering how often Biden likes to cite
Sanders voting with the gun lobby
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two key instances. Biden keeps doing so within the context of mass
shootings. However, Warren — who held off attacking Sanders on this
ground — consistently broadened her rhetoric on firearms to insist
that everyday violence also be a national priority. “It’s not just
mass shootings,” she said last June a day after a massacre at a
Virginia Beach government building killed 12 people, insisting that
gun violence occurs “on sidewalks and playgrounds and people’s
backyards. It’s happening family by family across the country. And
it doesn’t get the same headlines. And that is wrong.” Whether or
not it helps Sanders attract the black voters that have been going
Biden’s way, this is simply the right way to be speaking at this
moment — especially as the weather grows hotter
[[link removed]],
and the likelihood of shootings of all types grows.

On climate, it may only be Biden who needs the help. Environmental
activists have pressured Biden to improve his plan. As it currently
stands, it’s hardly enough to attract the kinds of young voters he
surely wants to draw away from Sanders and would need to excite in a
general election, most of whom have this issue at the forefront of
their minds. Warren’s plan
[[link removed]] not only embraces
the Green New Deal legislation, the kind of ambitious legislation
we’ll need if we’re ever going to keep this planet inhabitable,
but it rules out fracking — the hazardous extraction process for
natural gas that, yes, fills jobs in places like my native Ohio and
Pennsylvania, but would challenge Biden to come up with some
innovative job-creation strategies for those communities that might be
affected. It also prioritizes environmental justice and targets Wall
Street
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financing the climate crisis — things that should appeal to Biden,
if he wants to actually solve the problem and help Democratic
constituencies at the same time.

By her own characterization Thursday morning
[[link removed]], Warren
was trying to fill a center, if certainly not centrist, lane in this
contest: Biden was the so-called moderate and Sanders was labeled as
the liberal or leftist. Warren had an entirely different approach,
which she didn’t label. I won’t attempt to, but I’d characterize
it like this: Sanders has a lot of leftist ideas, many of which Warren
agrees with — but he offers many fewer specifics, puts them under
the umbrella of “democratic socialism,” and insists that we trust
him to carry those ideas to fruition. Biden simply insists that the
Sanders ideas can’t get done. “Much of what he’s proposing is
very, very much pie-in-the-sky,” Biden said
[[link removed]] Monday in an
interview, insisting that his platform lays out a more realistic path
towards health care and winning Democratic control of Congress. The
“Yes, We Can” vice-president was turning into very much the “No,
We Can’t” candidate.

Warren, with all of her plans, was the out: the candidate who said we
can get things done, but trust me, the person who has done the
homework. She’d predicted the 2008 financial crisis four years ahead
of time, she was the one who had built the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau at President Obama’s behest. She knew the nuances
of government inside and out and got shit done when afforded the
opportunity. She was the one who paid attention to details, who
studied for the exams, so to speak. Warren was Hermione, most often
saving the day behind the scenes while Harry and Ron got the shine. We
had read and seen this story play out before, and even many of those
supporters of her campaign who likely understood how it would end. 

Democrats are the only major party that can purport to champion
women’s rights in any kind of factual way. So the men in that party
have a responsibility, being that they’re the only ones who get to
be president, to help bring America closer to the day when those
little girls who Warren met can stop having to make “pinky
promises.” They can just run for president because they will know
that they can win. They will know that they have won. In 2020, we are
not going to get a woman in the White House yet again, so it is the
responsibility of the two men vying for the Democratic nomination to
now model the kind of behavior that will encourage the public to
embrace female leadership. It is a tall task, but it is a mild chore
compared to what Warren and the other women in the race have
undertaken.

If Biden and Sanders need to know where to begin, they should start by
listening to women when you get something wrong. Warren did that
herself when she said that life sentences in prison were an acceptable
substitute for the death penalty. But Black Womxn For organizer
Charlene Carruthers
[[link removed]],
having endorsed Warren, felt most comfortable approaching her and
asking her to reconsider, as the statement didn’t take into account
the disproportionate effect sentencing has on black and brown people
as well as the inhumanity one suffers during a life sentence. And
Warren did, quickly changing her entire policy
[[link removed]] to
reflect her mistake. She revised her stance to create a clemency board
to prioritize cases of older Americans who have been incarcerated. 

(While Sanders made similar remarks about life imprisonment, his
clemency board proposal
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specify helping older incarcerated people; Biden’s proposal
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insists that he plans to use his clemency powers to reduce
incarceration. Warren’s idea is better, and both men should adopt it
now.)

I can’t recall hearing too many stories like the one Carruthers told
from any presidential campaign. There is no need to be grandiose about
it: for a candidate of any color to hear black women and make a change
like that, that is merely a sign of competency and integrity. If those
men who aim to lead us through this morass cannot recognize the value
of such leadership and get those who question women in power to do the
same, we may be irretrievably lost.

_Jamil Smith is a Senior Writer at Rolling Stone, where he covers
national affairs and culture. Throughout his career as a journalist
and Emmy Award-winning television producer, he has explored the
intersection of politics and identity. Twitter.
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_Subscribe to Rolling Stone magazine
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