The Non-Invisibility Of Elizabeth Warren

I have previously written about the cesspit that is The Root, particularly its perceived profitability versus sister G/O Media outlet, Jezebel. Unless you like stale intersectional dogma delivered with a heaping helping of snark, there’s little inside that dank cave for anyone searching for fresh insights on racial matters.

Recently, a new essay by Michael Harriot on the subject of the Democratic primary generally and Elizabeth Warren hove into view, "Elizabeth Warren Exists". This one is so bad that it may have actually lowered my already basement-level opinion of Harriot as a journalist.

At this point, we need to take a brief detour into Harriot's recent coverage, and one story in particular. Harriot, you may recall, was late to writing about the Sarah Braasch "napping-while-black" non-incident; The Root's first installment came from Anne Branigin, a story that mostly pulls from the Yale Daily News piece. Harriot's first piece on July 20, 2018, "Woman Who Called Police on 2 Black Yale Students Says She's 'Done Absolutely Nothing Wrong' in Whitest Tweets Ever", manages to be both snarky and uncharitable to Braasch. (By contrast, Cathy Young's report covering the incident and fallout in The Bulwark gets the details that Harriot missed or refused to learn: that Braasch called campus police on a black non-resident in the dorm, Lolade Siyonbola, napping in a common room that was off-limits to outsiders. Siyonbola had a reason to extract revenge on Braasch for earlier calling police to break up a loud party on her dorm level. It was not, as Harriot and much of the outside press insisted, simply a matter of Braasch calling the police on a black person in the wrong place.) For reasons only he knows, he later called Braasch a "swamptwat", which is of a piece with former Gawker Media properties: if you can't be good, be snarky.

This is a pattern with Harriot, who fancies himself a connoisseur of what he labels "wypipo" (white people); he once made a defense of this racist expression of contempt which boils down to, only power plus prejudice can equal racism. As the Twitter account @neontaster once put it, "If you can't be racist against white people, then why are you trying so hard?" The answer to this question is that there's coin to be made, albeit not as much as women trying to plump their victimhood scores, which latter is over half again more profitable. Writing about matters racial with snark and verve doesn't have to be an exercise in unalloyed hate, something Gustavo Arellano showed us with his syndicated "¡Ask A Mexican!" column; he gave back as good as he got from racist idiots, but the genuinely curious (and polite) received thoughtful replies in Spanish-infused English. It is a model Harriot plainly rejects in favor of intersectional pugilism.

So, back to Warren. Warren, we learn, is invisible in the media, by which I presume Harriot means the TV punditry. A recent New York Times story expanded on this, mentioning her absence in a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll as well: the poll asked about head-to-heads with other leading candidates versus Donald Trump — but not Warren. To some degree, Warren has only herself to blame for this state of affairs. Despite being fourth in overall fundraising among Democratic candidates (and second if you omit self-funders Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg), Warren badly trails both Steyer and Bloomberg in ad spending — but also trails Bernie. What is she doing with her war chest? Saving it for Super Tuesday? Running a sham campaign so she can guarantee her reelection as senator from Massachusetts?

But of course the main reason why Warren might prove invisible is her showing thus far, winning a grand total of eight delegates. Of course, this is after only two states have rendered results, so it's hardly a representative sample. Warren hasn't drawn the same level of interest as Bernie, either, at least if you count Google searches:

Looking at news results, Google News shows 72,600,000 for "Elizabeth Warren" versus 107,000,000 for "Bernie Sanders", which is maybe more encouraging, but also broadly tracks the Google search results as well. What accounts for this state of affairs? I don't know, but I would speculate it's a number of things:

• She has Hillary Clinton's technocratic iciness, although I do think Warren's a better politician. Both had or have very long and detailed policy lists that can be off-putting.
• Warren hasn't had to win a state outside cobalt blue Massachusetts, so her success elsewhere is open to question. (But then, so is Bernie's.)
• Warren's virtue-signaling. This is an absolute guess, but her bid to give a veto to the Secretary of Education to a transgender kid smacks of political grandstanding she has no intention of implementing in office. Likewise her wealth tax that Peter Suderman called "probably unconstitutional" and a "stunt policy" that Sweden and most other countries adopting it eventually repealed when it failed to produce the promised revenues. She would also pursue a flatly unconstitutional program threatening social media companies for permitting protected speech on their websites.

Overall, things are not looking up for Warren. Recent polling shows her with less than half of Sanders' totals (24% to 6% in South Carolina, and 30% vs. 12% in Nevada) in the next two primary states. Even a Sanders/Warren unity ticket would not work, as national polls together show they don't make up even 50% of Democrats. It's a long road to November, and there's a strong chance Warren won't even complete the run of primaries. Harriot, incurious, fails to ask why black voters pulled the lever in greater numbers for Trump in 2016 than for Romney in 2012. Absent a historic candidate, it seems likely an enervated black electorate (and the presence of someone like Mayor Stop-And-Frisk) might possibly not change matters much.