As a conservative, one of my most-feared scenarios in the upcoming 2020 presidential election is Elizabeth Warren winning the presidency of the United States. If you want a Democrat to sit in the Oval Office for the next four years, you should not vote for Warren in the upcoming primary election.
As I stated in my argument in favor of Senator Amy Klobuchar, I think the only thing democrats should consider in this upcoming election is getting President Donald Trump out of office. Indeed, according to multiple polls, many Democrats “have indicated that finding a candidate who can defeat the president [this] November matters to them more than nominating one whose policies gibe with their own views.”
Warren is not the candidate for these voters in large part because of two major flaws: her policy positions and her history of falsely identifying with marginalized groups in order to earn sympathy.
Warren can, and likely will, do just fine with people on this campus: her main appeal is to white, college-educated progressives who like her liberal policy ideas and her “I have a plan for that” campaign slogan. Unfortunately for Warren, less than a third of the United States has a bachelor’s degree. Somehow, she will have to make inroads into other groups of voters, and she won’t be able to do this with her radical economic and social policy ideas. Trump will destroy her on the debate stage regarding her various personal controversies as well.
If you want an idea of how radical Warren’s economic agenda is, you should look at her website. Warren “will start to use existing laws on day one” of her presidency “to implement [her] student loan debt cancellation plan that offers relief to 42 million Americans.” Warren wants to eliminate student debt by having the federal government absorb the loss.
This means that taxpayers – many of whom never went to college – will have to shoulder the burden that individual college graduates took on. In other words, you will have to pay for everyone else’s college.
Warren also wants you to pay for other people’s childcare. By establishing a “Universal Child Care and Early Learning plan,” childcare under a Warren administration “will be free for millions of American families, and affordable for everyone.” Progressives like these policies because they expand access to services that would otherwise be unattainable for lower-income people. However, voters know you must raise taxes in order to achieve this and will remember that at the polling booth.
Her most explosive policy proposal is Medicare for All, which I wrote about last October. It is estimated to cost $34 trillion over the next decade, a daunting figure that have many “unnerved.” This is but a smattering of Warren’s overly ambitious economic agenda.
The most controversial aspects of Warren have to do with her own character. She had to apologize “for identifying herself as Native American during her career as a law professor” after her PR stunt that involved taking a DNA test to prove her tribal ancestry failed miserably. Also, Warren said she was fired from a teaching job for being pregnant, even though the evidence seems to point to the contrary. Until recently, she maintained that she left for family reasons, and publicly availably documents suggest that she was offered the job but turned it down.
Whether or not you believe Warren’s tales, there is no doubt that Trump will take her to task for them – and her policy positions – on the debate stage. Democrats need to elect a moderate in this primary for them to win. As a candidate who has chased Bernie Sanders to the left flank of the party and has repeatedly lay false claim to marginalized groups, Warren is not the answer.
Greg Fournier is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @greg_fournier.
