Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is, no doubt, gearing up for a major announcement about her inevitable presidential campaign after the first of the year, but she — like others, including Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) — will spend the next few weeks building a foundation for their attempts to attain higher office.
For Warren, that apparently means retooling her public image to appeal to both moderate Democrats skeptical of her more progressive economic theories, and to progressive Democrats concerned she’s only reaching further left to appeal to a wider base of voters.
To that end, Warren appeared at American University last week, where she gave a speech outlining her views on foreign policy, and it turns out, they’re strange, even by Elizabeth Warren standards.
WATCH:
According to Elizabeth Warren, American capitalists, whom she seems to believe had already “ruined” their own country by the time the Berlin Wall fell, spelling the end of the Soviet Union, raced to replace the failed Communist experiment with one of their own, encouraging former Soviet states to rapidly embrace the free market and the concept of private property — and that’s just awful.
“Champions of cutthroat capitalism pushed former Soviet states to privatize as quickly as possible, despite the enormous risk of corruption,” she laments.
Well, that’s just horrible. Those silly former Communist states should have just … stayed Communist! After all, there’s no economic structure that’s quite as free from rampant corruption as Communism!
Now, to be fair to Elizabeth Warren, there was a significant push to have former Soviet states flip over to free market states as quickly as possible, but the results weren’t necessarily bad … unless you’re an Elizabeth Warren kind of “capitalist,” where any market that could be described as “marginally free” is a sin against humanity.
The rest of Warren’s speech on foreign policy was a warmed-over rehash of Obama-era ideas: cutting defense spending, scaling back the military, dealing with authoritarian powers at the bargaining table, and adopting protectionist trade policies. Her foreign policy isn’t her own, and it isn’t subtle or detailed, and that’s no surprise; Warren has spent her life dealing almost entirely in theoretics as a professor and handling domestic policy as a Congresswoman.
But her lack of expertise in the foreign policy arena isn’t the only drawback dogging the Massachusetts senator as she prepares to undertake a presidential campaign. According to CNN, Warren’s initial polling numbers, including her “favorables,” are miserable, lagging behind even Hillary Clinton’s in some of the same contests. In her home state of Massachusetts, an embarrassing 89% of Democrats don’t think she should rise to the nation’s highest office.
That’s just brutal.