From The Rebels (Joshua Green, 2024) pp83-6
Warren’s star turn on The Daily Show made her into a household name and her critique shaped the national conversation. Her impatience with the Obama administration’s deference to Wall Street, her revulsion at winner-take-all capitalism, and her insistence that federal regulators seize failing banks, fire their managers, and write strict new rules became a template for how millions of people thought about the worsening national condition. Her flair for dramatizing her positions by provoking clashes with her adversaries only added to their appeal; she was easy to root for, provided you weren’t a member of the Obama administration.
But the success of Warren’s brand of liberal populism from that point forward owed no small debt to Stewart’s enthusiastic, ongoing endorsement of it each night on The Daily Show. And he was more than willing to give her a regular platform to expound on it.
“We did a debrief after the first show,” says Kun. “Jon instantly loved her. She was one of those no-brainers that you know you’re going to book again. Sometimes with guests I wasn’t sure and I’d have to talk to Jon first, get his reading. With Warren, there was never any question, She became someone we called back again and again.”
THE ALCHEMY OF highbrow cable comedy and her viral clashes with Tim Geithner and other Wall Street sympathizers made Warren a cult figure on the left. But Stewart’s imprimatur also gave her a kind of soft bower that extended further across the political spectrum. The Daily Show was just then at the apex of its influence. It was an important opinion setter, maybe “+e important opinion setter, for upwardly mobile young people and the sorts of civically engaged professionals who think of themselves as being dialed into popular culture — in short, the rising Democratic base. At the time, cable shows like Stewart’s still commanded real cultural power because their audience had not yer balkanized across TikTok, YouTube, and dozens of streaming services, Stewart himself was a powerful shaper of elite journalistic opinion. During this period, he was routinely lionized by critics and academics for his judgment and probity, and often touted as the Walter Cronkite of his era. That same year, a Time magazine poll found that Stewart was America’s most trusted newscaster.
Warren’s sudden prominence, buttressed by these collective forces, earned her the enmity of Wall Street’s allies in the Obama administration and beyond. She became the béte noire of a noisy breed of billionaire accustomed to being celebrated, not vilified, who would pop up on CNBC every so often and make martyred squeals of displeasure, which themselves went viral and fed into the growing sense that Warren was a figure of consequence.
But it wasn’t just the populist potency of her message that drew fans to Warren in droves. She was the type of woman whom a certain species of puffed-up male politician or banker couldn’t help but patronize, as Biden had done during the bankruptcy fight in 2005. In her role as oversight chair (and later senator), this sexist impulse, far from being a handicap, worked to her advantage, because it tended to produce moments of kinetic drama whenever Warren—who attended college on a debate scholarship — trapped some unsuspecting witness in an awkward evasion or a risible defense of the indefensible. Women especially (but many men, too!) savored these confrontations, and the rapid growth of social media and the proliferation of smartphones suddenly made it easy for them to give public expression to their feelings.
Right around this time, Warren inaugurated a specific kind of online political act that was new but quickly became common among the passionate tribes that sprang up around her: the posting and sharing of video clips of her slashing cross-examinations and beatdowns of various and sundry villains, each slapped with a crackling title brimming with righteous triumph, such as “Elizabeth Warren EMBARRASSES Bank Regulators,” “Elizabeth Warren Rips Wells Fargo’s CEO a New One,” “Elizabeth Warren Destroys CNBC Anchors,” “Elizabeth Warren Asks Why Sallie Mae Is Ripping Off Taxpayers to Screw Over Students,” and on and on, each clip leading algorithmically to the next in a crescendo of populist fury.
It wasn’t fun to be on the receiving end of her public wrath, to find yourself suddenly trending on YouTube, or to learn from your kids that your worst moment from the day’s hearing was being brutally dissected by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Often, the people who wound up in the crosshairs were fellow Democrats or members of the Obama administration. The attacks stung. Geithner would write in his memoir that he felt Warren “was better at impugning our choices—as well as our integrity and our competence—than identifying feasible alternatives.”
Other Treasury and White House officials were much harsher. Granted anonymity for reasons of self-preservation, they routinely disparaged Warren to reporters as a “professional critic,” “sanctimonious,” and a “condescending narcissist.” Resentful that she wouldn’t give the president and his advisers the deference many of them felt they were owed, they orchestrated a campaign of leaks that aimed, without much success, at tarnishing Warren’s heroic image. Venting to Politico, one former Treasury aide captured the flavor of the administration’s indignity: “We’re with Barack. We’re the liberals. Why are you pissing in our face?”
Whatever ill feelings she engendered, Warren’s gambit was a remarkable success. Using her part-time position on a largely power. less congressional panel, she established a populist beachhead within Democratic politics and quickly amassed a devoted following. She represented a new style of politics, too. No prominent Democrat was as willing as Warren was to criticize policies that had gone unchallenged for decades or to attack what she viewed as the formidable misalliance between Wall Street and the Democratic Party. With millions of Americans suddenly broke, scared, and angry, perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Warren’s message would resonate to the degree that it did. But harnessing that energy and yoking it to a populist agenda that could break Wall Street’s grip on Washington would prove to be a much tougher task.
Tgk1946's Blog 