The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sens. Warren, Sanders jockey for support
Pair eye 2020 presidential race.
It took a few minutes to find an opening, but when it came, Sen. Elizabeth Warren did not squander her best chance to connect with a heavily black audience at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta late last month.
“I was a Sunday school teacher,” said Warren, D-Mass., a former Harvard law professor, drawing a burst of applause before reciting from memory the verse in the Book of Matthew about helping “the least of these.”
A week earlier, at a black church in Detroit, Sen. Bernie Sanders,a Vermont independent, was handed his own opportunity to show a little-known side of himself to African-Americans: The pastor who introduced Sanders highlighted the senator’s youthful activism in the civil rights movement. But when Sanders took the podium, he made no mention of his attendance at the March on Washington, his arrest during a demonstration in Chicago against segregation or much of anything at all from his biography that could endear him to the congregants at the Fellowship Chapel.
The two liberal senators are often spoken of in the same breath as if there is scarcely any difference between them. But as Warren and Sanders work to expand their constituencies ahead of possible runs for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, they are making very different wagers about the electorate.
Warren has taken steps that reflect a traditional and
practical course. She joined the Senate Armed Services Committee to attain national security credentials. She is privately hosting monthly dinner seminars with policy experts to expand her command of the issues (last week was on Afghanistan and Pakistan and featured Barnett R. Rubin, an New York University-based scholar on the region).
And, as she demonstrated here with a reminder to King’s old congregation that “there’s Jesus in every one of us,” she is opening up about herself to satisfy the electorate’s hunger for personal connection.
Maybe even more striking than invoking Scripture, the scourge of Wall Street is spending some time with bankers: She attended a party fundraiser in July at the summer residence of a former UBS executive, and earlier this summer she met privately in Washington with JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon.
Sanders, however, appears to believe that no such nods toward pragmatism or convention are necessary in today’s Democratic Party.
He is still surrounded by the same coterie of advisers, is remaining a political independent and is as convinced as ever that people will respond to his wellhoned pleas to confront the billionaire class, provide health care for all and offer tuition-free access to college.
To the frustration of some of his advisers, Sanders has shown no willingness to veer from his social justice catechism to tell voters the personal details of his life’s journey, banking that an electorate that could elect Donald Trump to the White House no longer needs such political rituals.
Which of them is better able to broaden their appeal beyond the liberal white activists who crowd their public appearances could ultimately determine their prospects.
“It’s how well you do with African-American women, that’s the key,” said Jaime Harrison, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said about his party’s presidential primary.
Perhaps most illuminating is the difference in how
the two address a pair of intertwined issues: health care and President Barack Obama.
Defending the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature domestic legacy, is a staple of Warren’s speeches, and she takes care to salute the former president.
“That’s a leader,” she said to applause in Atlanta, praising Obama for pushing through the health law.
While she is supportive of Sanders’ proposal for universal health care, her embrace of a single-payer system is aspirational and not nearly as central as protecting what she sees as the recent gains made to health care coverage. She is also looking for other incremental ways to expand coverage or lower the cost of care.
For Sanders, it is just the opposite: He was outspoken against Republican attempts to repeal the health law, but he is far less animated by defensive fights than by leading the movement toward a single-payer system.
As for Obama, Sanders sees the man who many Democrats believe will go down as
one of the country’s greatest presidents as largely incidental to his vision. Speaking for just under an hour to thousands of supporters at his People’s Summit in Chicago last summer, Sanders made only a passing mention of Obama on the same weekend that Illinois’ governor, a Republican, was reportedly ready to sign a bill making the former president’s birthday a commemorative holiday in the state.
Certainly, a Warren nomination would underline how ascendant liberalism has become in the party, but to put Sanders forward as their standard-bearer would suggest that Democrats want to make a far more profound break from conventional politics. The party would have edged toward his brand of democratic socialism.
“The Democratic Party is a vehicle for him, but, for better and worse, he doesn’t embrace it or claim it,” said David Axelrod, the longtime Democratic strategist and former chief political adviser to Obama. “Elizabeth is much more supportive of the party even as she works to push it left.”
It is possible that the nominee will be neither Warren nor Sanders, and there will be no showdown. The three best-known candidates in a potential presidential field (to include former Vice President Joe Biden) may not run at all. And a host of other Democrats may be lining up for 2020 who could prove formidable, such as Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
Advisers to Warren, eager to tamp down any hint of tensions, made a point of noting that the senator and her husband, as well as Sanders and his wife, found themselves with delayed flights at Reagan National Airport in Washington earlier this year and used the time to catch up at an American Airlines lounge.
And Sanders is sensitive to the topic of his relationship with Warren: When the journalist Franklin Foer tried to ask him about it earlier this year, “he peremptorily dismissed me from his office,” Foer wrote in The Atlantic.
Some of Sanders’ advisers, proud of how successful they were last year and determined to get their due, are less restrained.
“I love Elizabeth Warren, but she doesn’t have a 50-state organization, and she doesn’t have an email list in the millions,” said Mark Longabaugh, who worked on Sanders’ campaign.
Those in the party more sympathetic to Warren, however, believe that she has far more potential to expand her appeal.
“I think she is very different in a conversation than when she’s on the stump,” said Robert Wolf, the former UBS executive who hosted Warren and other Senate Democrats for a fundraiser this summer.