Apparently, it’s time for Warren to resume her former practice of “sucking up to billionaires!”
Last September, The New York Times reported that the vast majority of funds raised for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “100% grassroots funded” presidential campaign came from corporations and billionaire megadonors hosting one swanky fundraiser after another for the Massachusetts senator (far more than she needed for her Senate race).
And yet, not long ago, Sen. Warren was on the debate stage in New Hampshire condemning all of her male rivals for “sucking up to billionaires.”
(She’d already tagged Pete Buttigieg for his “wine-cave” fundraisers — and Mayor Pete had already hit back, noting that Warren, herself, has attended plenty of exclusive, billionaire-hosted fundraisers: “This is the problem with issuing purity tests you cannot yourself pass.” Democratic Party grandee and former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell chimed in: “Can you spell hypocrite? …She didn’t have any trouble taking our money the year before… All of a sudden, we were bad guys and power brokers and influence-peddlers. In 2018, we were wonderful.”)
Forbes reported in November that although Buttigieg and Biden are the billionaires’ favorite candidates, the campaigns of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar have been funded by 27 billionaires (between the two of them).
Yet on the debate stage in New Hampshire, Sen. Warren sought to tar Bernie Sanders with the same brush as Buttigieg and Biden, the two most billionaire-dependent candidates in the race. She hung her lie on a technicality, because Bernie Sanders actually does have one super PAC backing him (one that she’d previously celebrated): “Our Revolution.”
BUT ALL SUPER PACS ARE NOT THE SAME, SENATOR, AND I SUSPECT YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT — EVEN WHEN YOU WERE SMEARING BERNIE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE WITH THIS UNCONSCIONABLE LIE.
Our Revolution is composed of nine 100% grassroots-funded progressive organizations: The Sunrise Movement, Indivisible, Movement Voter Project, Make the Road Action, Center for Popular Democracy Action, Dream Defenders, People’s Action, Our Revolution, and National Nurses United (environmental groups, progressives, nurses, immigrants’ rights groups, voter rights groups — representing the opposite end of the spectrum dominated by the billionaires and corporate lobbies that have historically backed Warren, Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and the rest).
Mike Figueredo of The Humanist Report asks a perfectly legitimate question of Sen. Warren: “Do you honestly believe that Dream Defenders and Our Revolution and the Sunrise Movement are comparable to the Wall Street-funded super PACs that back people like Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden?”
We’re waiting for your answer, Senator. With baited breath, we await your next Bernie-smearing contortion of the truth, you sexist, ratfucking, culture-appropriating, white privilege-reeking, Trump-applauding, right-wing-talking-point-spouting HYPOCRITE.