Elizabeth Warren Is Not the Ted Cruz of the Left

The symmetry was irresistible. Last weekend, as Ted Cruz almost blew up the budget deal over immigration and Elizabeth Warren almost blew it up over banking regulations, pundits seized upon an analogy. Both senators are articulate, ideological, media-savvy, beloved by party activists, and problematic for party leaders. Thus, Warren is the Cruz of the left.

Bad analogy, argues Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, noting that it’s Cruz and the GOP that want “to use government funding as leverage to undo policy measures Democrats enacted in the 111th Congress.” Warren just doesn’t “want to pay the ransom.” The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan is dubious too, noting that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner dislike Cruz a lot more than Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi dislike Warren.

But there’s another, more fundamental, difference. Cruz deepens America’s red-blue divide. Warren could scramble it.

Think about Cruz’s highest-profile crusades: against Obamacare, against Obama’s executive action on immigration, against raising the debt ceiling, against gun control. They all exhilarated conservative activists and repelled their liberal counterparts.

With Warren it’s different. Her signature crusade is against the economic and political power of Wall Street. And it’s a crusade that appeals to elements of the American right. Most conservatives don’t like big banks either. In 2012, Pew found that while 78 percent of Democrats said Wall Street “only cares about making money for itself,” 66 percent of Republicans did too. Sixty percent of Mitt Romney voters said there was “too much power in hands of a few big companies.” And according to a 2013 Huffington Post poll, Republicans agreed that “banks and financial institutions have grown too big and powerful” by a margin of almost two to one.

More here: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/elizabeth-warren-is-not-the-ted-cruz-of-the-left/383786/