By Peter Hasson
Some leftist journalists have rallied to defend Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren from answering whether she will raise taxes on middle-class Americans.
Warren made it through the entirety of Tuesday night’s debate without giving a clear answer to a question she’s been dodging for weeks, drawing criticism from her fellow candidates. Some lefty journalists, though, argued Warren shouldn’t have been asked to answer the question in the first place.
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“Journalists are kindly doing President Trump’s work for him when they insist on trying to pin down Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), the new front-runner, to declare she’d raise taxes to fund Medicare-for-all,” Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote Wednesday.
“Of course, it’s legitimate to dig into the costs, but not in a way that creates a nice GOP campaign ad, and misses the larger lens of overall costs,” Sullivan added.
Another Post columnist, Paul Waldman, argued that the “only problem” with Warren’s answer was that “while she rejects the premise of the tax question, it would be even better if she also explained why it’s important to reject the premise of the tax question.”
“You might say that she talks about this in the way she does because saying you’ll raise taxes is politically toxic. But when we just accept that instead of pushing back on it, we ensure that it remains politically toxic. And that’s of course just what Republicans want,” he added.
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote on Twitter that “The ‘make Elizabeth warren say she would raise taxes on the middle class’ question should be a credibility killer. For the journalists who keep asking it.”
HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney wrote a piece ahead of Tuesday’s debate arguing that it was unfair to ask candidates about raising taxes. The question “is a trap, premised on the idea that raising taxes is always bad politics,” Delaney wrote.
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