Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
Elizabeth Warren, as head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, testifies before the Senate Finance Committee hearing to examine the Troubled Asset Relief Program, on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 21, 2010.
Senator Warren has kicked the Wall Street beast that has the economy by the throat, and of course the roused beast is kicking back. With Joe Biden faltering, Wall Street Democrats are frantic for some other candidate who might block a Warren nomination, and pundits are piling on Warren for her supposed Medicare blunder.
One pundit who should know better is Tom Edsall, who let loose with an anti-Warren diatribe in Wednesday’s Times.
I admire Edsall and have learned a lot from him over the years, but he committed one real howler when he treated Larry Summers as a reliable or neutral source:
Larry Summers is a former secretary of the Treasury, director of the national economic council and president of Harvard. The Warren program, Summers wrote by email, “dwarfs the errors, economic and political, of George McGovern.”
In a Nov. 5 Washington Post op-ed, Summers argued that:
“Warren’s plan will discourage hiring, particularly of low-skilled workers, by firms that currently provide generous benefits. These firms will face the most burdensome taxes when they increase hiring and will gain the greatest cost savings by laying off workers.”
As Edsall has to know, Summers more than anyone else promoted the financial deregulation that led to the 2008 financial collapse. And Elizabeth Warren, as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bank bailout, spent three years raking Summers over the coals for his policy of putting bankers first and homeowners last.
Then she topped even that public service, as a brand-new senator, by organizing other Senate Democrats to warn President Obama not to appoint Summers chair of the Federal Reserve. And she succeeded, so the post went instead to the estimable Janet Yellen. Animus doesn’t begin to describe Summers when it comes to Warren.
Elizabeth Warren has made a few missteps, but she remains a formidable candidate. That’s what has Wall Street and its apologists so frightened. One expects better from Tom Edsall.
