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Elizabeth Warren’s American Story

Joan Walsh on the senator, plus Jeet Heer on Joe Biden and Andrew Bacevich on America's unending Middle East conflicts.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

June 27, 2019

Elizabeth Warren speaks to local residents during a meet and greet on Sunday, May 26, in Ottumwa, Iowa.(Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo)

Campaigning in Iowa, Elizabeth Warren has made her story an American story, Joan Walsh says, and thereby found a good way to connect her policy proposals to her own life, and thereby to other people’s lives—and also to refute critics who say she’s an out-of-touch policy wonk.

Also: Joe Biden and his friends. He says some of them were segregationist senators—and he thinks that was a good thing, something that made it possible for him to pass important legislation. Jeet Heer says that’s a fantasy—Republicans are not going to work with Biden if he gets the nomination and defeats Trump. Jeet is a new national affairs correspondent for The Nation.

Plus: Recently Andrew Bacevich visited the Middle East Conflicts Memorial—it’s like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but for all the Americans who fought and died in all of America’s wars in the Mideast. But unlike the Vietnam Memorial and the World War II Memorial, it’s not on the National Mall in Washington, DC; instead, it’s in Marseilles, Illinois. That says a lot about the place of our unending mideast wars in our current political debates.

 

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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