Liz is out.
This is incredible. If you had asked me a week ago, Joe Biden was toast, not even in the top half of the running moderates, but now he’s the undisputed king and even Bernie Sanders is the underdog. Definitely Joe’s race to lose at this point, but I think his nomination is inevitable.
Liz decided not to endorse Bernie or Biden. It’s probably for the best. If she was going to play her hand in full support of progressives, she would have dropped out before Super Tuesday and endorsed Bernie. Now it’s too late. She’s vacuumed up a pretty big pool of delegates that may or may not have largely allocated to Bernie had she dropped sooner. Damage is done. With Bernie on the path to losing, the best thing she can do is not upset Joe and use her leverage to try to get some of her platform in Joe’s plans. If she were to endorse Biden before his (inevitable) nomination, that would be a pretty bad look.
Elizabeth Warren was my second choice candidate after Bernie (Yang was actually first, but I always knew he was not viable). I rooted for them both as a team, especially in the beginning when they protected each other from the moderates in the debates.
Unfortunately though, Liz couldn’t prove that she could walk the walk when things got hard the way Bernie has. When Pete Buttigieg railed against her support of Medicare for All, she relented and pulled more center on the issue. She didn’t start her campaign outright rejecting super PAC money like Bernie, but eventually she made a vow against it and then knocked Pete and others for their big money donors. That’s great, except when her campaign started running out of money she embraced a super PAC, and pretended she wasn’t being hypocritical.
When her campaign momentum was running out of steam and Bernie was pulling way into the lead before the Iowa caucus, her campaign decided to opportunistically reveal allegations to the media that in a private conversation last year, Bernie supposedly said that he didn’t believe that a woman could become President, contradicting everything Bernie has publicly stated and demonstrated through his actions over the past several decades. Forcing Bernie to squander his time refuting these claims of sexism wasted the best opportunity for him to go after Biden on his problematic history. Instead, Joe got off relatively easy that night. All so Warren could score a shallow win in the names of girl power and identity politics (the women on stage are winners, the boys are losers!) rather than letting Bernie score more substantive wins against Joe on racial (school segregation), sexual (Anita Hill), and economic justice (bankruptcy bills, student loans, welfare reform, crime).
On the plus side, she knocked out not one, but two rich buttholes from the race.
A single line ended John Delaney’s run: “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.” Delaney couldn’t recover, he just smiled like a goofball as he tried to silently calculate how many millions of his dollars she just set on fire.
Liz skillfully eviscerated Bloomberg in both debates he joined, especially that first one. Liz entered that debate swinging, saying: “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, and no I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.” (Unfortunately she didn’t recognize the hypocrisy of criticizing Bloomberg’s body-shaming when she later on made a joke about his height: “I want to talk… about a threat that is coming our way. And it’s a big threat. Not a tall one but a big one: Michael Bloomberg.”)
I think America owes Liz a debt of gratitude for eliminating the threat of Bloomberg. If nothing else, she prevented the Democratic Trump from being a thing. And we should also be thankful that despite her drifts toward the center, she was a strong voice beside Bernie for most of the debates that helped give legitimacy to progressive ideas despite a stage full of moderate naysayers.