Joe Biden Shreds Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Elitism,’ Makes A Play For Red States

Former vice president Joe Biden is taking advantage of new revelations, uncovered by a New York Times poll published earlier this week, and attacking Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), his closest competitor for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, over her “elitism.”

Writing on the crowdsourced content site, Medium, Biden called Warren “condescending,” and labeled her approach an “angry unyielding viewpoint.”

“Some call it the ‘my way or the highway’ approach to politics,” Biden wrote. “But it’s worse than that. It’s condescending to the millions of Democrats who have a different view. It’s representative of an elitism that working and middle-class people do not share: ‘We know best; you know nothing.’ ‘If you were only as smart as I am you would agree with me.’ This is no way to get anything done.”

He repeated the comments at a fundraiser Tuesday night in Pittsburgh, adding some off-the-cuff remarks responding to Warren’s assertion last week that Biden is running in the “wrong presidential primary,” because he insists on adopting a more moderate view of things like health care and student loan forgiveness than Warren and the rest of the party’s progressive wing.

“I have fought for the Democratic Party my whole career,” Mr. Biden wrote on Medium. “I know what we stand for, who we stand with and what we believe. And it’s not just policies or issues. It’s in my bones. That’s not something everyone in this primary can say.”

At the fundraiser on Tuesday, he added, “I’ve been a Democrat my whole life. This person has only fairly recently in the mid-’90s become a Democrat,” according to the New York Times.

The recent, public feud between Warren and Biden, opened up after Warren accused Biden of “repeating Republican talking points” in reference to her nonsensical “Medicare-for-All” plan that could cost trillions of dollars and has little support from Democrats overall — unless those “Democrats” happen to be progressive social media denizens.

Warren has prickled at the “elitism” insult before, and her only way of dispelling the criticism seems to be an increased aggression towards the corporate and financial sectors, something that isn’t winning her much love from big money Democrat donors.

JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon weighed in on Warren’s angry rhetoric toward Wall Street in an interview with CNBC this week, noting that Warren has a habit of “vilifying” successful people. Another report that surfaced this week indicates that Democrats with connections to the financial sector are withholding donations from the Democratic Party writ large, leaving leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) scrambling to distance the party from Warren’s rhetoric, at least privately.

Biden’s strategy here, though, may not be just to draw his closest political rival into an open feud in the hopes of winning over potential Democratic primary voters: he’s also listening to messages being sent by Rust Belt and “battleground state” voters.

According to groundbreaking poll from the New York Times, released on Monday, Biden — not Warren, as conventional wisdom would believe — is the only Democrat giving President Donald Trump a run for his money in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — the same states that handed Trump his victory in 2016.

It may be that Biden’s messages of economic populism and moderate liberalism are resonating in those states but, more likely, it’s simply that Warren’s message, targeted at the left wing of the Democratic Party, just isn’t. For Biden to gain ground on Warren, he needs to hammer home that he’s the more likely candidate to defeat Trump, and the only way to do that is to embrace voters that are likely to view Warren as out of touch — and there’s no better way to do that than focus heavily on Warren’s weakenesses.