“Giant blind spots”: Elizabeth Warren says Barack Obama does not understand the “lived experience of most Americans”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., criticized former President Barack Obama and her own political party for selling out to corporate donors and failing to stay in touch with the working class in an interview with The Guardian on Monday.

“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,” Warren told the magazine, “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,” she added.

Warren’s comments came on the same day newly released data showed that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lost the election last November in large part because an overwhelming amount of Americans flipped their votes for Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump just four years later. Warren stated that while there are plenty of ideological differences between Republicans and Democrats in the U.S., one thing remains in common between the two parties — selling out to wealthy elitist donors.

“The Republicans have clearly thrown their lot in with the rich and the powerful,” Warren complained, “but so have a lot of Democrats.”

The senator, widely speculated as a top presidential contender for a 2020 challenge to Trump, is promoting her new book “This Fight is Our Fight,” which focuses on the middle being under siege in America.

“We are no longer a country that believes we can do politics only once every four years, or even once every two years, no longer a country that says that democracy is only about elections and that it will tend to itself in the time periods between elections,” Warren told the Guardian.

While rumors have flown around about Warren gearing up for a presidential run in 2020, she has repeatedly denied it and insists on resisting Trump on a daily basis.

“He put millionaires and billionaires in charge of his government; he has signed off on one law after another to make it easier for government contractors to steal people’s wages, to make it easier for corporations to hide it when they kill or maim their employees, to make it easier for investment advisers to cheat retirees.”

Original Article
Source: salon.com
Author: Charlie May