In July 2019, Elizabeth Warren was part of a debate with former Congressman John Delaney.
Delaney was also running for president, and he criticized Warren for being unrealistic.
I think Democrats win when we run on real solutions, not impossible promises, when we
run on things that are workable, not fairy tale economics.
If you want to understand Elizabeth Warren, her response to that is a great place to start.
I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running
for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t
fight for.
I don’t get it.
Elizabeth Warren wants to make really big changes to the way things work.
It’s going to take big structural change in America.
It's a thread you can find throughout her career, from her years as a law professor,
to her creation of a new federal agency, to her time as a US Senator.
Warren doesn't want to revert America back to a time before Trump.
She wants to change something more fundamental about the country's institutions.
We can’t fix this broken system by only treating symptoms
So, where did that idea come from?
Is that what we want?
And -- if it is -- is Elizabeth Warren the best person for the job?
In the early 2000s, Elizabeth Warren wasn't a politician yet.
She was a law professor, and she was trying to figure out why so many Americans were filing
for bankruptcy, at a time when the economy seemed to be doing great.
The thing you have to understand about Warren's academic work is that it was counter to the
conventional wisdom when it was happening.
Most people agreed at the time that the US economy was strong.
The unemployment rate was low, GDP was high, and global trade agreements like NAFTA had
made tons of goods super cheap…
But Warren saw that underneath it all, something in American life had changed.
Families live in a much more dangerous economic world than they did a generation ago.
One thing Warren was doing was refocusing how we thought about the economy from what
was happening in the economy to what was happening to families themselves.
In particular, she noticed that to cover basic expenses, American families were
taking on more and more dangerous loans.
Alan Greenspan was sworn in for his fifth term as chairman of the Fed.
This makes the time ripe for a conversation with Elizabeth Warren.
Alan Greenspan, our national economic leader, has stood up for the last four years and told
Americans “borrow against your house!”
It helped her realize before almost anyone else that something bad might be coming
in the economy.
That's really scary financial advice for someone to be giving American families.
And what frightens me, is millions of American families have taken that advice.
Warren said those things in 2004.
Four years later, she turned out to be right.
One in every 500 homes defaulting on their mortgage, economists worry the housing slump
will plunge the broader economy into a recession.
The federal government Tuesday began pumping billions of dollars into U.S. banks.
Citigroup and Wells Fargo are each getting $25 billion.
Is there a word for your emotions, mood, watching all of this?
Yeah, I think I alternate between furious and astounded.
We bailed them out and they keep all the profits and taxpayers pick up all the losses.
There's this moment in 2009.
The recession is on full blast.
This is when I probably first saw Elizabeth Warren on television.
Please welcome to the show, Elizabeth Warren!
She goes on Jon Stewart's show and just sort of explains what's going on.
We go fifty years without a financial panic.
Then what happens, we say “regulation, ah it’s pain, it’s expensive, we don’t need it,”
so we start pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric.
So we have two choices.
We’re going to decide basically “hey, we don’t need regulation, it’s fine" Or, alternatively,
Or, alternatively, we're going to say "You know
we’re going to put in some smart regulation, and what we’re going to have going forward
is we’re going to have some stability and real prosperity for ordinary folks."
And that’s socialism
(laugher/applause)
That incredibly clear explanation of what’s going on kind of knocks him for a loop.
That is the first time in probably six months to a year, that I’ve felt better.
He breaks character in that moment to say thank you.
That was like financial chicken soup for me.
Thank you.
Something that I think is important to note, though, is what makes sense about it.
Something that has been a through line of Warren's career is that complexity is something
the powerful wield against the powerless.
And complexity is something that people use to shift blame.
Well, if the financial crisis is too complex for anybody to understand.
You can't fix it and you definitely can't blame anybody for it.
What is distinct about Warren in my view, is that she does understand these problems
so well.
Elizabeth Warren has a lot of plans.
My question is, what is her plan to make the plans a reality?
What's interesting about her in this respect, is compared to a lot of the other candidates,
she's much more specific on how she would get these things done.
I mean, we've had this Democratic primary that is about differences in plans... that
the candidates are not likely to have the votes in the Senate to come anywhere near
passing.
And here's Warren arguing in a way the others primarily don't, that we should get rid of
the filibuster.
That means lowering the number of votes a bill needs to pass the Senate from 60 to 51.
We should get rid of the Electoral College.
So whoever gets the most votes actually becomes President.
We should make D.C. and Puerto Rico states.
So that millions of US citizens who can’t vote for the President or members of Congress
would finally be able to.
It is often ignored, because process isn’t sexy, but process ends up deciding outcomes.
She's been much more focused on it, and much more ambitious than most of her competitors.
And it's something that actually sets her apart in the field.
On a debate stage, or in a long grueling campaign against Donald Trump, what do you think voters
would learn about Elizabeth Warren who don’t know her very well now.
I think one of the advantages Warren has, if you’re going to make the case for her,
she has built a much more thoroughgoing theory of political corruption and how it attaches
itself, not just Donald Trump, but to the entire system he came into.
Huge fossil fuel corporations have bought off our government.
The gun industry has bought off our government.
If you look at the way some of the other matchups look, Joe Biden is clearly going to run against
Donald Trump as, Donald Trump is a bad man who does not reflect the best of American
values.
There is some possibility that could work.
But also, it didn't work that well in 2016.
I think Warren wants to push against Donald Trump as an emblem of political corruption.
So let’s start with the obvious, Donald Trump is corruption in the flesh.
That is a place where polling suggests he's a lot more vulnerable.
And so Warren's particular approach to Trump, where she is able to say… that this kind
of political corruption is the problem.
That is a very potent attack in American politics.
In some ways it's a potent attack Donald Trump levied reasonably well against Hillary Clinton.
And it's one Warren is arguably, I think, uniquely capable of levying back against Donald Trump