Nevertheless…

Don’t get me wrong. I love Elizabeth Warren. I have loved her for years. I loved her when she was setting up the Obama administration’s consumer protection agency, I loved her when she decided to rum for Senate after Obama chickened out of naming her as the head of the agency she created, I loved her when she nevertheless persisted during the confirmation hearing for Jeff Sessions. I love the woman.

Nevertheless, when she announced last year that she was running for President, my initial reaction was: Don’t do it!

Do I think Elizabeth Warren would make a good President of the United States? Yes. Did I think when she announced that she had a hope in hell of beating Donald Trump this November? No.

Leaving aside the whole Pocahontas thing (for which she has never adequately owned up or apologised), there are just too many challenges for her to overcome with the often mentally challenged US electorate.

There’s the obvious one: she’s a woman. In many democracies that would not be an overwhelming challenge, but the sad fact is that too many American voters still think the President should be a man. Not that this stopped Hilary Clinton winning the popular vote by a substantial margin, but not in the right states. That might have been different in 2016, if Warren had been the Democratic candidate. If the Democratic National Committee hadn’t decided that 2016 was Clinton’s turn, no questions asked. God knows, there were a lot of women (and men) looking longingly at Warren four years ago and wishing she was the first female candidate for President.

And then there’s that other quirk of the US electorate. While those annoying coastal elites truly value intelligence in their President, it’s a simple fact that a large percentage of voters in the middle distrust obviously smart people. They like their Presidents to be folksy, someone you could imagine having a beer with and shooting the breeze. There is no question that Bill Clinton is an intelligent man, but he was also folksy. In the right crowd he could Bubba it up with the best of them. And, yes, Barak Obama is certainly very intelligent, but he could and often did sound like a regular guy.

Warren is a wonk. Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. In fact, it’s a very good thing for a President to be able to understand all the nuances of policies. Very good indeed. But try telling that to some of the coal mining families in Kentucky or the former factory workers in the Rust Belt. They don’t want policy, they want blood. And that’s what the Tangerine Wankmaggot offers them.

For a month or two after Warren announced her decision to run for President, I thought, hoped, I was wrong. She was drawing huge crowds, raising a shitload of money. I still worried about all the negative ads the Republicans would be churning out and wondered if she could completely crush the Wankmaggot in a debate, because nothing less than him looking like the cockroach he is crushed under his opponent’s shoe would suffice. But I started thinking maybe, just maybe…

Then fucking Bernie Sanders announced he was having another run at the presidency. Tosser. He couldn’t just sit back or, better yet, get behind her candidacy and rally all his 2016 supporters to do the same. Oh, no, not fucking Bernie. He had to be The Man.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I like Bernie, always have. Then again, I liked Jeremy Corbyn and look how that turned out. (Which, trust me, is exactly what the DNC is thinking, but that’s a rant for another day.)

There was only ever room for one progressive candidate in this race.

God bless Stephen Colbert for kind of nailing his colours to the mast last week and flying down to South Carolina to have lunch with and thoroughly humanise (See? You can have a beer with her!) Elizabeth Warren.

I don’t know what Colbert hoped to accomplish. South Carolina was probably always going to be the shot of adrenaline Biden’s campaign needed. If he hoped the piece would send Bernie voters Warren’s way (as it should have done), obviously not enough South Carolinians were watching that night. And that’s a shame.

I don’t know how much longer she can persist. Whatever happens, at least we’ll all be able to treasure the memory of Warren eviscerating that bampot Bloomberg.

Fucking Bernie.