A question about Warren

[Otto Lidenbrock]

Just a curiosity I have - Hillary got panned by progressives when her "Goldwater Girl" past was brought up. She was 17 at the time of the 1964 election and voting age at the time was 21. But Warren who was a Republican until 1996 (age 47) largely has escaped being asked about it on the trail.

Goldwater wanted to repeal the Civil Rights Act act in the 1960s, so did Reagan. Did Warren support Reaganomics which in many ways derailed the middle class she now has the plans to fix?

Now I like Warren, I've often said on here when it comes to policy details she is miles ahead of the rest. I would be happy to vote for her because she has a track record since being a democrat of progressivism. My curiosity is will her Republican past be a hindrance for her as it was for Hillary. Or have we reconciled that the attacks on Hillary were overblown?

[FreeBe]

1. Warren is strong and vocal in all progressive issues and has proven herself.

I do not see a question.

[Otto Lidenbrock]

2. i don't disagree with that as a democratic legislator

But she was a republican into her 40s. At some point she will be asked why.

[Turbineguy]

4. There are lots of people here at DU

Who used to be republican. At one time the republican party appealed to thinking people.

[FreeBe]

7. All she has to say is two decades of proving herself. Hands down. End of story.

[at140]

26. As people mature and gain wisdom, they change

Intelligent people evolve. Stupid people are stuck in a rut.

[mcar]

3. So did Hillary

She was vilified by some on the left, not only for her "Goldwater Girl" past, but also for laws her husband got passed.

[FreeBe]

10. Right. I felt it was down right petty and stupid. Going after a 17 yr old influenced by her father's

politics she walked away from 4 decades. Right? I feel strongly assigning her Bill Clinton's actions was sexist.

[Nuggets]

23. Hillary Clinton

is strong and vocal in all progressive issues and has proven herself.

I see a good question.

[FreeBe]

24. Ya. Well, I do not see a question in a 17 yr old copying her father's politics.

She was out of the phase pretty quickly and has been a a strong progressive Democrat for 5 decades. I think it is silliness to even have a discussion about HRC and her position as a teenager.

[Bradshaw3]

5. On the contrary

Reagan made a lot of hay out of being a former Democrat who said the party left him. Warren can make the same argument while her current progressive credentials are beyond reproach.

[forgotmylogin]

6. Nothing shows intelligence and rational thinking better than leaving the Republican party. (n/t)

[at140]

27. ((((((((THIS))))))))

[mahina]

28. This right here.

Bingo.

[mountain grammy]

8. My husband had to get his driver's license renewed.

While he was there he finally dropped his Republican affiliation and changed to un affiliated.

He voted for Reagan, a fact he's not proud of. Has voted all Democratic since. Says he can no longer stand to see Republican after his name on the voting rolls. Finally!

He'll vote for Warren in the primary, as will I.

[jalan48]

9. Hard to understand how someone could be a Republican during the Reagan years.

Looks like she's gone 180 in the opposite direction which is a good thing.

[Hortensis]

34. We lived in a conservative-dominated city for a couple

decades in Southern California (after moving from West Hollywood, and boy did I miss it). But conversation with conservatives then was very, very different from what it became.

The Republican Party still had a fair number of liberals in it then who hadn't left (still has some for that matter), was only at the beginning of purging traditional conservative and progressive beliefs, and had not yet purged its moderates from office to replace with RW extremists. All these attitudes were accepted. Looking back, reaganism signaled the instillation of intense corruption into government by anti-government/anti-tax/anti-regulation plotters, but we didn't realize it then.

Warren left when the move to wealth-driven corruption abetted by hard right social conservatism continued instead of rebounding. Don't know how she voted before then, but voting across the ballot used to be very common, and lots of people change their voting for years before they change the party they were raised with.

[Hekate]

11. Hillary will be a punching bag for the GOP and the Left until she's cold in her grave...

...and beyond. The number of lies about her is endless, and started back in Arkansas, when she was a young feminist lawyer married to the governor. The horror: she kept her own name and career.

At this point Hillary-bashing is an industry of sorts, a reliable narrative, both lazy and untrue.

Elizabeth Warren is a latecomer to politics -- any detractors she has are miles behind those of Hillary.

[Hortensis]

35. And now she's being used by the left to go after Warren.

Despicable -- and typical. Purveyors of these smears out themselves immediately.

[George II]

12. It doesn't bother me, it bothered me less about Clinton.

[Celerity]

13. she was only a registered Republican from 1991 to 1996, only Repub POTUS she ever voted for was Ford

She grew up in an FDR Democratic household.

Her first vote the POTUS was AGAINST Nixon in 1972. She did vote for Ford, but liked Carter. She voted Carter in 1980 and Mondale in 1984. In 1988 she voted for Dukakis, and in 1992, Clinton. Obviously voted for Clinton again in 1996 and every other Democrat since then. She registered as a Republican because she had moved to PA and liked Arlen Specter, who also switched to our Party from Republican.


Maybe people also have issues with former Republicans Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Chris Coons (has Biden's old seat in the Senate), Carolyn McCarthy, Harley Rouda, Gabby Giffords, James Webb, Wendy Davis, Gil Cisneros, Jim Jeffords, Patrick Murphy, and Specter himself, etc.etc etc.? If so, it is news to me. Some of them even ran (oh the HORROR!) for President.

Her first presidential vote, in 1972, had been cast against a man she said she disliked passionately, Richard Nixon. But reflecting on how little she had paid attention to day-to-day politics at the time, she couldn’t immediately recall who had been running against him. When told it was Democrat George McGovern, she said, Yes, she would have voted for him but didn’t have any specific memory of having done so. (She was living in New Jersey at the time.)

Going to the polls, she said, was nothing new for her. Warren’s mother had been a poll worker and brought her young daughter to the polls each Election Day.

Nixon was re-elected that year, of course, but resigned and was replaced by Gerald Ford. Warren said she had voted for him in 1976, believing that “Ford was a decent man.”

But she was happy with Jimmy Carter, who beat him. “I thought he [also] was a decent man,” she said, transferring her then-standard for what she wanted in a politician from Ford to Carter. “He was a really good man.”

As the ’80s wore on and her research on bankruptcy progressed, Warren started waking up politically. At the time, though, the two parties had yet to separate entirely along ideological lines, as some deeply conservative and racist Democrats still held office, as did some genuinely liberal Republicans.

In 1988, Warren voted for Michael Dukakis but, in 1992, split her ticket, voting for Republican Arlen Specter for Senate and Democrat Bill Clinton for president. Specter is a good example of the one-time flexibility of the party system and the politicians within it: He began and ended his career as a Democrat, but was a Republican for much of the middle of it.

By the fall of 1987, she had moved to Pennsylvania and registered there as a Republican. Warren said she couldn’t quite remember why she did it but that she was a fan of Specter. “Again, I thought he was a decent man,” she said. She couldn’t recall whom he ran against. (His Democratic opponent was Lynn Yeakel.)

That GOP registration, though, has set off speculation over the years that one of the Senate’s most progressive champions may have at one time been a Ronald Reagan backer.

So we asked her: Is it true? Is it possible the champion of the regulatory cops on Wall Street voted for the man who made deregulation a hallmark of his presidency?

No.

In 1980, she said, she was a registered independent living in Missouri City, Texas, and cast her vote to re-elect Carter.

When Reagan won, she wasn’t happy but not crushed the way she was on election night in 2016. “I was disappointed and didn’t like him, but I wasn’t deeply worried for the country, not anything like when Trump was elected,” she explained. If she could go back in time, she said, she would tell herself “this was a far more pivotal historical moment than you understand.”

Warren is tied for the 2nd lowest Trump score in the entire Senate



compare that to the highest Democrats




NO way can she be framed as some consistently villainous ex-Rethug who was in it for the cash (she grew up dirt poor) and is some late-comer to the game.

[FreeBe]

14. We have just got to stop putting HRC as a Republican at 17 yrs old. Silliness.

But, thank you much for this clarifying information. I did not know the history. I am not bothered with Warren being an XRepublican anyway. Thanks.

[TwilightZone]

15. "Maybe people also have issues with former Republicans...Hillary Clinton,"

Some people here on DU did indeed have issues with Clinton being a former Republican. It was a near-constant talking point for some during the 2016 campaign, along with the e-mail nonsense and her speaking tours.

It is an interesting contrast. I'm not sure why Warren gets a pass on her decade as an R, particularly from those who made Clinton's past a constant topic, but I think both are non-issues. Context is important.

[Celerity]

16. I think both (and the others I listed) pasts are not worthy of any remotely disqualifying

stance. Thus my statement. (and a very small, tangential part of my main focus of the post).

I was not here in 2016, so no idea about who was trying to ridiculously slag off Sec. Clinton for something that happened more than 30 years before I was even born. Must have been fans of the only other major primary candidate.

Last thing I want to do is get down into the weeds over 2016. My only intent was to try and give the background story on the whole dodgy 'Warren as some shady Republican in the past' meme.

[TwilightZone]

17. Agreed.

I was just noting that the OP's point about the contrast is interesting in the context of how Clinton was treated here in 2016. And thanks for the info. I was aware of part of the background, but not in that much detail.

We're in agreement that it's a non-issue. I'm firmly in the "what have you done lately and what will you do now?" camp where all of our candidates are concerned. I was a Wesley Clark fan in 2004 and he'd been a Republican (though, a mostly-apolitical one) a lot more recently than Warren. He had also had a similar epiphany.

[Celerity]

19. here is how I got that list btw (I even put the link in my reply from the beginning)

I would have left Clinton out if I knew it would detract from my main thrust of defending Warren.

I just went through it and looked for familiar names to show (well tried to show, lol) how silly it all was..

List of party switchers in the United States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_party_switchers_in_the_United_States#Republican_to_Democratic

Republican to Democratic

[TwilightZone]

21. Nah, including Clinton strengthens the argument, doesn't detract from it.

[Hortensis]

36. Sanders' hostile surrogates "had issues" with Hillary's dad's

influence on his teenage daughter before she went off to college. No one else. You'd have to love a deception as obvious as that one to soak it up and spread its poison everywhere you go, right?

As for Warren, obviously they're trying, as this OP so obviously illustrates, to use the lie about Hillary to smear Warren also. Making lies into issues is SOP. Warren's record is making it difficult for them to cast her as one of McConnell's nest of traitors, though, isn't it? Bless their nasty little hearts.

Nevertheless, we can be sure they'll be injecting their poison into the national dialogue all through the primary, and some right through the GE if she is our nominee.

[stuffmatters]

18. I see Warren's move from the dark side to the lit side a strong plus to wobbiily Repubs & Indies

She has a common sense and powerful explanation of her conversion that goes something like this: " I was a Republican until they became only the party of the rich & big business hammering middle class families. I realized Democrats were the party for the people, while the Republicans had become the party backing only the rich, big business, the banks and empowering them to destroy working families."
C'mon MSM ask Warren this question again...

[tishaLA]

20. She's discussed this at length.

Here's one article about it: https://theslot.jezebel.com/this-is-why-elizabeth-warren-left-the-republican-party-1833995821

TL;DR version:

Her research, however, turned her assumptions on their end. As she started digging into people’s bankruptcy files, the “world slowly starts to shift for me, and I start to see these families as like mine—hard-working people who have built something, people who have done everything they were supposed to do the way they were supposed to do it,” she said to the Intercept. She saw families who “had been hit by a job loss, a serious medical problem, a divorce or death in the family, and had hurtled over a financial cliff.” Warren continued: “And when I looked at the numbers, I began to understand the alternative for people in bankruptcy was not to work a little harder and pay off your debt. The alternative was to stay in debt and live with collection calls and repossessions until the day you die. And that’s when it began to change for me.”

[Honeycombe8]

22. Speaking for myself, I don't care if someone changed parties.

It happens a lot, I'm sure. People change, the parties change, issues change, priorities change. Also, the moderates in both parties aren't THAT far apart on all issues; on some issues, they'll actually agree. This is what some politicians are thinking, when they speak of working across the aisle. They are thinking of the old days, when the Republican Party was more normal and had establishment moderates, who WOULD be open to compromise. That's no longer the case, except on the most basis of bills, like a middling budget bill.

Warren's case is interesting, though, because she's not moderate. She's more progressive than moderate left. So her ideology wouldn't have come close to a moderate Republican's ideology on just about any issue. That's fine with me. It just shows she changed. People who really consider issues are more apt to evolve on those issues, I think.

[Recursion]

25. 31 years ago, Rick Perry and Elizabeth Warren were campaigning in Texas

Last edited Fri May 24, 2019, 08:43 AM - Edit history (1)

Rick Perry was campaigning for Al Gore, and Elizabeth Warren was campaigning for Bob Dole

When you understand that you will understand the party system transformation the US has undergone in the interim

[Celerity]

30. 'Rick Perry was campaigning for Al Gore, and Elizabeth Warren was campaigning for Bob Dole'

link showing that please

[obamanut2012]

31. Google it -- Rick Perry himself

Recursion isn't a liar.

[Celerity]

32. 'google it' is not good enough. I want a link showing Warren was in Texas campaigning for Dole

She voted for Bill Clinton, hell she voted for Dukakis and Mondale. The only Republican POTUS she voted for was Ford in 1976, but she then flipped and voted for Carter in 1980. She was only a registered Republican from 1991 to mid 1996, when she switched to Democrat, but had already been voting Democratic before that. Also, she was a non political office-holding Harvard professor in 1996, why would she be down in Texas campaigning for the opponent of the man (Bill Clinton) she had voted for in the last election, a man (Dole) who was the nominee of the party she had just switched FROM?

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

33. Google? What's Google? haha!!

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!

[FM123]

29. She can use leaving her former party to her advantage, like Ronald Reagan did