Clarity

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has been saying things recently, and some of them are really dumb.

In an interview yesterday, she was asked about the person charged with the murder of Iowa college sophomore Mollie Tibbetts. The man charged seems, at this point, to have been in the United States illegally. Sen. Warren first expressed sympathy for the Tibbetts family, who until the discovery this week had been holding out hope the young woman was still alive. She then pivoted to critiquing immigration policies that had resulted in family separations.

Now, I linked the above source because it included the senator's entire quote and more or less correctly characterized it. Waaaay too many other sites that reported on her interview did so in such a way as to make it look like Sen. Warren had directed her remarks about "the real problems" to the Tibbetts family as well, which is at best a very loose reading of her actual quote and can easily be considered flat-out false.

Yes, as the Legal Insurrection writer notes, Sen. Warren's statement is kind of an own-goal -- she had a solid place to stop but didn't and wound up saying something that when accurately quoted is tone-deaf and when inaccurately quoted is fodder for her many detractors. So although she shanked this putt, this was really not the dumb thing she said.

In a radio interview, Sen. Warren would not commit to serving out her full Senate term if she is re-elected this year. A lot of people think it's because she plans to run for President herself in 2020, but if she commits to the full six years in the Senate and then switches, she will get grief from other candidates, including President Trump if she wins the primaries and then becomes the Democratic nominee.

It's kind of hard to imagine that President Trump, if he runs again, at a lack for things to say against Sen. Warren, which means she might not have thought about this all that deeply. One solution would be for her to say, "I'm running to win the Senate in 2018, and I'm giving strong consideration to running in 2020 although I haven't completely made up my mind." But that would be close to the truth, and elected officials often get cooties when they are brought too close to that substance. It's not really the dumb thing that Sen. Warren said recently.

No, the real dumb thing was her proposed "Accountable Capitalism Act," a bill she introduced that would place the operation of any business with more than $1 billion in revnue under the direct control of the federal government. Kevin Williamson at National Review outlines some of the reasons the idea is, in his words, "utterly bonkers." He also points out the cynical nature of Sen. Warren's proposal, suggesting that she knows the legislation wouldn't pass nor, if it somehow did, would it survive a court challenge. She may like the idea, but she knows it's not happening and is just trying to win some points with the leftier elements of her party. Another NR writer, lawyer David French, notes that the statute is written vaguely enough to mean nothing, reinforcing the idea that it's much more ploy than proposal.

It's dumb because, in the end, no one would be persuaded to vote for Sen. Warren based on this proposal. People who like the idea would be predisposed to vote for her anyway, and people who would vote against her don't need new reasons to do so when she's offered us lots of them already. It's dumb because while it might win her a nomination, it's ready-made GOP campaign commercial fodder. Remember, Sen. Warren. While Massachusetts voters were indeed dumb enough to send Ted Kennedy back to the Senate year after year, most of the rest of the country's Democrats, when given a choice between him and then-President Jimmy Carter, picked Carter.

So even voter cluelessness has a bottom -- which would be a good thing to remember also.