Elizabeth Warren names unfair advantages: "beauty, luck, physical skills, height, knowing someone who can fix the outcome"
Elizabeth Warren knows that the people of Massachusetts have been tricked, cheated, fooled and mistreated. But has all of that predation happened only at the hands of connected banksters and real estate sharks?
At the Daily Caller, Charles C. Johnson digs up a 1996 quote in which the 2012 Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts lists other tools that the 1 percent use (uses?) to keep the rest of us down. In a Harvard Law School yearbook profile, Warren channeled her inner Diana Moon Glampers:
"What is the one thing you have never done but always hoped to do?" the unnamed interviewer asked.
"Win a contest that has nothing to do with brains," Warren responded. "I want to win something because of beauty, luck, physical skills, height, knowing someone who can fix the outcome — something unrelated to smarts."
Johnson allows that Warren may have been speaking sardonically, fashioning her own public persona by what she claimed to reject. Johnson's theory is that Warren in fact made use of a factor unrelated to smarts by claiming American Indian heritage in order to score hiring diversity points.
Warren, who is challenging Sen. Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts) in a high-profile race, has built a popular following by voicing public resentment toward the wealthy. Her view is that contemporary Americans have, without their consent, been shackled to a future of all-consuming debt. Because she does not generally include public debt among her concerns, Warren believes this problem can be solved technocratically, through generous debt forgiveness (As We Forgive Our Debtors is the title of a 1989 book co-authored by Warren); tighter restrictions on markets at all levels; and more aggressive public management of the financial system.
But in that long-ago puff piece Warren highlighted the world view that produced her particularly combative economic theory.