... After multiple media reports Tuesday night and Wednesday morning that U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, had joined Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in endorsing U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders for president, Tlaib tapped on the brakes.

"I have not made any endorsement at this time," Tlaib said in a statement to the Free Press, adding that she is planning to bring Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont, to her Detroit-based district on Oct. 27 for a tour.

Tlaib's office also said that she is not planning to be part of a Sanders rally in New York City this weekend despite reports that she would be. Instead, she is expected to be at a rally of progressives in Lansing.

Sanders' campaign confirmed the trip to southeast Michigan, though no other details were released.

That doesn't mean Tlaib won't endorse Sanders, only that she hasn't done so at this time. Recently, Tlaib welcomed another Democratic presidential candidate — U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — and the two talked about environmental hazards in the district and filmed a Facebook piece together.

More at https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/10/16/rashida-tlaib-bernie-sanders-endorsement/3997815002/

On Tuesday night, 12 candidates crammed onto the stage at Ohio’s Otterbein University. It was the first time that all of the remaining Democratic presidential hopefuls have shared the same stage on one night.

But the attention was almost all focused on one candidate, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has emerged as the frontrunner after a slow and steady rise in her support, and who has crystalized her position in recent months as the party’s intellectual and ideological center of gravity. Questions were framed around her policy positions, her past statements, her agenda; other candidates staked their claim to positions almost exclusively in relation to where Warren stands. Even on the rare occasions when Warren was not speaking, not directly being spoken to, and not being spoken about, her dominance hung over the conversation, making itself known in unexpected moments. At one point, a moderator, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, addressed another contender – Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar – by Warren’s name. Klobuchar smiled and graciously deflected, but within minutes, she was bringing up Warren herself.

...She was attacked by Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg over how she plans to pay for Medicare for All. She was attacked by Andrew Yang over her plan to break up big tech and enforce a strict anti-trust agenda. She was attacked by Kamala Harris, who alleged that Warren was hypocritical for, of all things, not calling on Twitter to suspend Donald Trump’s account. She was attacked by Joe Biden for supposedly being “vague” on Medicare for All. She would have been attacked by Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for her lack of military experience, except Gabbard was cut off by a moderator.

For the most part, Warren weathered these attacks with patience, grace, and an agility in her rhetoric that rivals that of a gymnast on a balance beam. She refused to take the bait repeatedly offered to her by moderators and other candidates, who attempted to goad her into saying that she would raise taxes to cover Medicare for All. This denied her opponents a video clip that they could use to discredit her; instead, she hammered home the larger point that total costs would go down under her plan. She refused to get mired down in the petty point of whether or not Twitter should suspend Donald Trump’s account; instead, she focused on how Big Tech companies have too much influence over our politics to go unregulated. She wouldn’t concede Andrew Yang’s dubious assertion that unregulated tech giants encourage innovation; instead, she focused on the ways that monopolies in all sectors of the economy—she cited agriculture and pharmaceuticals—need to be broken up to protect consumers.

It was a front runner’s strategy, a deflection technique meant to avoid inconvenient commitments and stymie the attack strategies of her rivals. Warren made moral cases instead of economic ones, refusing to get mired down in the kinds of specifics that can only be communicated poorly and haphazardly to voters within the confines of the contentious debate format. To make her case in a general election, she will have to become more willing to communicate the specifics of her multitudinous plans on a mass scale, more ready to get down to brass tacks on television and on the debate stage. But Tuesday’s debate was her first as the object of rivals’ ire—before tonight, her opponents had more or less held their fire against her. The discipline and poise she showed in this newly antagonistic role bodes well for her performance in a general election against the erratic and taunting Trump. He will bait her and goad her, and she will be able to calmly and convincingly remain on message.

More at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/16/elizabeth-warren-attacked-democratic-debate?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

https://twitter.com/EmmaVigeland/status/1183798607121715203

https://twitter.com/RebeccaKKatz/status/1183785014577815553

https://twitter.com/jwestin2/status/1183835819775332352

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren danced to Aretha Franklin and posed for selfies as she marched Friday night in the Las Vegas Pride parade.

The Massachusetts senator, who is gaining momentum in the crowded field of White House hopefuls, was the only candidate to appear at the parade in the early voting state.

Nevada, which holds presidential nominating caucuses on Feb. 22, is the third in line to cast votes for the Democratic nominee.

Warren, wearing a rainbow-hued feather boa, walked Friday night behind a banner with supporters and her campaign staff, cheering, raising her fists and dancing. But she frequently broke away from the marchers and ran to the sides of the parade route to give out hugs and pose for photographs. She would then sprint back to her spot behind the banner, drink a swig of coconut water, and keep going.

Warren did not make any comments or hold any other public campaign events in Nevada Friday.

Other Democratic presidential candidates sent family members on their behalf and had supporters marching carrying their signs.

More at https://kdwn.com/2019/10/12/warren-marches-in-las-vegas-pride-parade/

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Her dismissal from a job 48 years ago had been catapulted into the news by a conservative media outlet, and she herself had just ignited a fresh round of hand-wringing about her willingness to court big donors for the Democratic Party if she is the presidential nominee. So as Senator Elizabeth Warren faced a knot of reporters after a walking tour of an environmentally degraded neighborhood here on Wednesday, she had to work to keep the focus on the matter at hand. “Did anyone,” she asked pointedly, “have a question on environmental justice?”

Warren’s steady climb in the polls is drawing increasingly frequent barbs from her rivals and heightened scrutiny of her every move, opening up a new phase for a disciplined candidate that could distract voters from the core message and policy proposals that have helped propel her rise. But as the heat picked up in recent days, Warren’s strategy — as shown in her remarks in South Carolina this week — has started to emerge. While the idea of combat has long been central to Warren’s political brand — the word “fight” is in her campaign slogan and two of her book titles — she appears to be carefully picking her battles.

She has largely ignored jabs from her Democratic opponents while saving her fire for attacks more central to her political identity — an approach that seems intended to project strength and focus ahead of a potential contest with President Trump while downplaying her Democratic rivals.

Warren strongly fought back when the conservative Washington Free Beacon questioned the accuracy of a story she frequently tells on the campaign trail, turning it into a galvanizing moment for her female supporters. At the same time, she declined to respond to overt or subtle criticism from Democratic rivals like former vice president Joe Biden, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, even though it is something she could face more of on the debate stage Tuesday in Ohio as her opponents scramble to change the trajectory of the race.

“The clock’s running out,” said Colin Reed, a Republican strategist who worked on Scott Brown’s unsuccessful Senate race against Warren in 2012. “I don’t think she’s going to implode on her own.”

...Warren’s allies have used the incident to draw favorable comparisons between her and Biden, who responded tentatively as Trump began making unfounded claims about his son’s activities in Ukraine before he finally called for the president’s impeachment this week. “He comes out of a generation of Democratic politicians that tends to be a little more cautious,” said Mike Lux, a former staffer for Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign who supported Warren during her fight to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“Elizabeth, I think, is used to hitting back harder and faster,” Lux said, recalling the words from a sign he kept on the wall when he worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign: “Speed kills.”

More at https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2019/10/10/elizabeth-warren-picks-her-battles-attacks-pick/9eXRLicIKmgFPv3MEzQezK/story.html

Elizabeth Warren has a plan for responding to people who come up to her at rallies to say, “my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.”

The question came from an audience member, channeling a phrase often invoked by marriage equality opponents who, as he put it, describe themselves as “old fashioned.”

“Well, I'm going to assume it's a guy who said that,” Warren deadpanned, “and I'm gonna say, ‘Then just marry one woman. I'm cool with that.”

Then she twisted the knife: “If you can find one."

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/lgbtq-town-hall-2019/index.html

WASHINGTON — President Trump and his allies have struggled for months to come up with effective ways to confront Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose steady rise in the polls put the lie to Mr. Trump’s boasts last spring that she was “finished” and “gone,” undone by her past claims of Native American ancestry. Republicans have tried to brand her as a socialist, attack her policy ideas and portray her as too left-wing for the American electorate. None of those arguments have diminished her political momentum, robust fund-raising or polling.

But in the past week, conservative news sites have challenged Ms. Warren’s story about how a public school principal forced her out of a teaching job in 1971 because she was “visibly pregnant,” and the Republican National Committee grabbed onto the issue to wage its own attack. In doing so, Republicans employed a tactic — questioning a female candidate’s authenticity — that is at once often a sexist trope in politics and a strategy used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Ms. Warren and her team, in turn, have confidently parried those attacks and used them to rally supporters. Rather than take a defensive posture, Ms. Warren has responded by offering her personal story as one of countless instances of pregnancy discrimination that have occurred in American workplaces, where it remains a widespread problem. In a video that has been viewed more than a million times across social media platforms, Ms. Warren read messages from women sharing their own experiences. Christina Reynolds, who was an aide on Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and is now a spokeswoman for EMILY’s List, which supports female Democratic candidates who back abortion rights, said the Warren campaign’s move to solicit stories from people was a better response to the line of attack “than just saying, ‘No, it’s not true.’”

“I think it’s a really powerful thing that she’s done,” she said, “which is turn this into a learning opportunity for all of us as to what women have faced at past times, what they might still face and how can we do better.”

...Ms. Warren’s campaign demonstrated readiness for the attacks as news outlets began publishing articles in recent days about her public-school teaching career and pregnancy. Ms. Warren spoke with CBS News to go into greater detail about her story, and she and her campaign sought to shift the focus onto the broader issue of pregnancy discrimination. Her admirers praised her on social media and others offered support, including some rivals in the 2020 race, a sign of the protectiveness that many Democrats feel toward their candidates in the face of Republican attacks.

Jennifer Palmieri, who was the communications director for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign, noted the extent of that unity around Ms. Warren. “This could have been something that really got pounced on by her opponents,” she said, “and that didn’t happen.”

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-fired-teaching.html#click=https://t.co/QBgcDGD7py

WASHINGTON — Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren released a plan Wednesday calling for environmental justice in responding to climate change, proposing steps to reduce what she called the disproportionate effect that pollution has on low-income and minority communities.

Warren, who has made the fight against climate change a key to her Democratic presidential campaign, said that a “just transition” to clean energy as outlined in the Green New Deal has to happen by “prioritizing communities that have experienced historic disinvestment.” She cited studies showing that toxic waste sites, landfills, congested highways and other sources of pollution hit harder in places such as predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods.

Warren would direct the Environmental Protection Agency to extensively map which communities are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change so federal clean air and water rules can be adjusted and promised to hold an environmental justice summit within her first 100 days in office if elected president. She would also direct one-third of a proposed climate investment under the Green New Deal into communities most at-risk of adverse environmental impact, which she said would equal at least $1 trillion dollars over the next decade.

...In an effort to better understand the far-reaching impact of climate injustice, Warren said she recently visited what is considered Michigan’s most polluted zip code with Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Detroit and its suburbs. Warren toured a school located next to several industrial plants and a community center, where she talked to people affected by the high levels of pollution that has caused cancer among their family and friends.

“These big corporations have enough muscle with the government that they squeeze it to get tax breaks,” Warren said to community members outside the community center in a video released by her campaign. “So the cost of running these schools and keeping these roads paved falls disproportionately on you. So you’re not only paying the cost in terms of what you breathe, what your children breathe…you’re also paying the cost out of pocket.”

More at https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2019/10/09/elizabeth-warren-calls-for-environmental-justice-addressing-climate-change-part-new-campaign-proposal/NEwS5uF7skb2xd3JVJ2P3I/story.html