Warren for president! It’s not easy to be optimistic

The media began to call her “the grand dame of the American left,” and, certainly, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is attracting ever growing audiences with a speech that deals frontally with topics that almost all the politicians in the U.S. usually avoid.

While a couple of politicians — Barack Obama among them — have referred to the widening inequalities, there is a kind of pact of silence about the deep causes of the status quo.

Warren seems unafraid to express in public her condemnation of the unholy practices of the big corporations and the outrages committed habitually by Wall Street bankers.

“If the bankers raise their own salaries every two years, the minimum salary should rise every two years,” she usually says.

The traditional tax policy (a thorny issue that politicians barely dare to question) is continuously criticized by the senator, who believes that it is fair to raise the taxes for the most affluent, to the benefit of the most needy.

Warren proposed to her Senate colleagues the creation of a law that might ease the situation of millions of U.S. students burdened with debt, and might reduce their onerous obligations by providing lower interest rates, with financing from a new tax on the big fortunes. Needless to say, the Republicans rejected the Democratic senator’s  arguments.

“Today is a great day for multimillionaires,” Warren said in response to the rejection. “For the 40 million people burdened by student loans it has not been good. All this raises a fundamental question: For whom does Washington work?”

Last month, Warren visibly raised her popularity rating when she addressed an audience that represented the more than 50 million Latinos who live in the United States, brought together by the National Council of La Raza.

The senator thrilled her audience with a high-flying speech about the need for changes that greatly ensure the equality of opportunities for the different strata of the U.S. population. Her words sounded like a government plan drafted by someone who prepares to occupy the nation’s top executive post.

To the degree that some in the audience shouted: “Warren for president!”

But Warren did not say there — or anywhere else — that she will enter the primaries for president, although, as the media point out, her support is growing exponentially and her candidacy could bring hope to millions of people.

However, before challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination, Warren will have to weigh carefully her chances of success, gauging not only her evident capacity to earn the voters’ sympathy but also the real opportunities that she would find in the United States’ exclusive electoral system.

Some commentators recall how, in the electoral process that culminated in 2008, a senator from Chicago, lacking in experience and almost unknown on a national level but delivering a speech similar to Warren’s, was able to triumph in the primaries over his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and eventually gain the presidency.

They forget that the most powerful sector of the establishment seemed reticent for a while, before placing its trust on Barack Obama for president of the United States.

But the campaign to attract delegates in the Democratic primaries consumed an unheard-of amount — nearly $500 million — which demonstrated once again that a candidate’s success depends on his or her ability to raise funds.

By then, Obama had been co-opted by the establishment because, as is well known, the huge majority of the resources collected for an electoral campaign come from the big financial and industrial corporations.

In the United States, it is an axiomatic truth that the success of a candidate depends on his or her ability to raise funds.

So long as Warren remains firm about breaking away from the traditional conservative budgets, turned into common sense by the reproducers of ad hoc ideology, the establishment’s “reticence” will fall upon her.

If the power elite feels threatened, the manipulators of public opinion, especially in the communications media, will try to demonize the Massachusetts senator, branding her as communist, socialist, populist, ultra-leftist and other gems.

Taking into account the previous reasoning, an eventual triumph by Warren seems unthinkable if her campaign does not manage to revert two traditional elements of U.S. electoral history: the scant participation of Americans in elections, and the pitiful contribution of funds by lower-income sectors to underwrite the astronomical expenses of an electoral campaign.

Among the voters who abstain from voting are many unsatisfied people who want real change, and Warren would have to get their vote in order to compete. Likewise, from that low-resource but multitudinous mass, she would have to get the funds denied to her by the big financial and industrial corporations.

In any case, there’s still two years to go before the electoral machines work at full speed and nobody knows what could happen in this changing and chaotic world to fulfill or thwart Elizabeth Warren’s dreams. We shall see.