By Peter Barry Chowka
© By Peter Barry Chowka. All rights reserved.
On Monday, December 31, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) confirmed mounting speculation that she would be the first major politician out of the gate to declare her candidacy for the 2020 Democraticpresidential nomination. On the last day of the year, her newly formed “Elizabeth Warren Presidential Exploratory Committee” took over the Web site elizabethwarren dot com, and Sen. Warren used it to announce her intention to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020. Predictably, the Web site featured a slick four-and-a-half-minute biographical video touting Warren’s purported accomplishments during a lifetime of bootstrap achievements and purported selfless service to the people. It was also notable for bashing white Republican politicians as the evil enemy and stoking the hot embers of divisive racial and identity politics that are consuming the country. Before 24 hours had elapsed, Warren’s 2020 campaign video had accumulated over 220,000 views on YouTube.
Interestingly, Warren disabled comments on her official video. On Wednesday, January 2, 2019, the videohad an equal number of thumbs up and thumbs down ratings – about 3,200 each.
Also on December 31, Warren live streamed a bizarre low tech cell phone video on her Instagram account from the kitchen of her Cambridge, Mass. home. The 14-minute “kitchen video” streamed once live at 7 P.M. EST but was not archived at her Web site or her Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook accounts. It was obviously designed to humanize Warren, who is widely perceived as a smarmy, insincere politician who faked or exaggerated an alleged Native American background in order to use affirmative action to get ahead in her profession as a college law professor.
The kitchen video featured brief glimpses of Warren’s dog and her husband. The decisive moment came when she suddenly paused and walked off camera to “get me a beer” from her refrigerator while the live stream continued uninterrupted. Interestingly, although the kitchen video was not officially archived it was captured and uploaded to YouTube by Newzzcafe and other sites. At 8 A.M. EST on January 1, 2018, the Warren “kitchen video” had had only 132 views at Newzzcafe. The number increased significantly after I linked to the video in an article at American Thinker and other media also picked up the story.
The kitchen video appears to have been an ill-advised attempt by Warren and, presumably, her campaign advisors to make her seem hip and relevant to her party’s influential base of leftist social media-driven low-information young voters. Their model may have been socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) live streamed video of herself making mac and cheese on November 9, 2018 that went viral and trended on social media.
One of the hosts on Fox News’s Fox & Friends program on January 1 described the Warren kitchen video as “creepy.” And so it is. The Web site legalinsurrection dot com, in its analysis of the video, referred to it as Warren’s “Dukakis tank” moment. See the Web site for a description of that ignominious event that helped to destroy Democratic party nominee Gov. Michael Dukakis’s lead over Vice President George H. W. Bush in the 1988 campaign for president.
See Warren’s kitchen video for yourself here. And then decide what you think about Sen. Warren as a potential POTUS.
Addendum. On January 2, 2019, CNN ran a story titled “Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar score high on electability; Elizabeth Warren, not so much.” The article was based on a formula for determining “electability” based on a variety of metrics and factors evaluated by a CNN analyst and a company called Catalist. The results do not seem to bode well for Warren’s future against a large and tough field of ambitious Democratic Party contenders for the 2020 nomination.
