Massachusetts’s senior senator had a lot to say this week, beginning it with a knock on former President Barack Obama’s grasp of economic realities and ending it by claiming that her GOP adversaries’ new health care bill will wind up killing Americans.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, who just last week criticized Obama and said she was “troubled” over the former president’s plans to deliver a $400,000 speech at a Wall Street health conference in September, told The Guardian during a stop on her recent book tour she thinks Obama pointed to too many national economic statistics and was unable to visualize the hardships facing the bulk of Americans.
“I think President Obama, like many others in both parties, talks about a set of big national statistics that look shiny and great but increasingly have giant blind spots,” she told the news outlet. “That GDP, unemployment, no longer reflect the lived experiences of most Americans. And the lived experiences of most Americans is that they are being left behind in this economy.
“Worse than being left behind, they’re getting kicked in the teeth.”
Warren, who may or may not be using the book tour to ramp up her visibility in preparation of a 2020 White House run, has nonetheless been identified by her frequent social media sparring partner President Donald Trump as the Democratic frontrunner.
“I have a feeling that in the next election, you’re going to be swamped with candidates but you’re not going to be wasting your time,” Trump told members of the National Rifle Association at their annual meeting in Atlanta last week. “You’ll have plenty of those Democrats coming over and you’ll say, ‘no, sir, no, ma’am.’ It may be Pocahontas, remember that? And she is not big for the NRA, that I can tell you.”
The “Pocahontas” taunt, directed at Warren, is a jab referring to the Cambridge Democrat’s decision to check off a minority box meant for Native Americans when she applied for a teaching position at Harvard Law School. Warren has claimed she has Cherokee lineage but critics say the evidence for it is non-existent. Warren has fought back against Republicans’ claims that she wrongly used the status intended to boost minority applicants to advance her own career.
“I am very proud of my heritage,” the Oklahoma-born Warren told National Public Radio during the run-up to her successful 2012 Senate election. “These are my family stories. This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mamaw and my papaw. This is our lives. And I’m very proud of it.”
Meanwhile, Warren has apparently shifted her focus on social media away from ripping Trump and has now zeroed-in on House Republicans, who on Thursday passed the American Health Care Act, essentially a repeal of Obamacare.
This isn’t football. It’s not about scoring points. #AHCA will devastate Americans’ healthcare. Families will go bankrupt. People will die.
Warren, however, has made sure to connect the bill to the Trump administration, dubbing it “Trumpcare.” She slammed the bill’s “one little extra provision to make sure that people with preexisting conditions can be discriminated against in the healthcare market.”
In her Thursday tweetstorm, she also localized the bill, drawing parallels to Massachusetts’s own struggles managing the opioid addiction crisis:
This Trumpcare bill still rips funds away from states like Massachusetts that are battling the opioid crisis. #AHCA
Curiously, it was Warren who in November broke with the rest of Massachusetts’s all-Democratic Congressional delegation to oppose a medical research spending bill she claimed constituted a rich hand-out to the pharmaceutical industry. A significant feature of the bill included a two-year allocation of $1 billion dedicated to combating opioid abuse.
The bill was enacted in December.
(Courtesy — Associated Press) 
