by Dish Staff
James Antle III quips that “Elizabeth Warren may be the last liberal in America who doesn’t want Elizabeth Warren to run for president”:
Warren was interviewed by National Public Radio Monday and was asked the standard question several times. “I’m not running for president,” she said. What is she telling liberal independent groups? “I told them, ‘I’m not running for president.’” Never ever? “I am not running for president,” she replied. “You want me to put an exclamation point at the end?”
Sounds pretty definitive, right? Except the Washington Post responded to the interview with a piece titled, “Why Elizabeth Warren is smart to not totally rule out running for president.” The political press clearly wants Warren to run.
Sargent doesn’t believe Warren “has any intention to run.” So why are progressive groups still talking her up?
Anything that boosts Warren’s visibility might also boost the potential power and influence that Warren may be able to exert within Congress — and over the Democratic Party in general — as their chosen vehicle for progressive policy ideas. That might boost the groups’ own influence over the debate.
Tomasky calls Warren the most powerful Democrat in the country:
But she does have this problem:
The media will always peg her as “left,” a word that in modern American media usage is clearly a pejorative. And if she just gets stuck there, her influence, however great among the Democratic base, will never grow outside of it. More centrist Democrats will make a few gestures in the Warren direction, but nothing more.
So Warren’s great challenge is to counter that dismissal by showing that her ideas do indeed have appeal outside the hard-shell Democratic Party base. They do, potentially—a number of polls have shown that Americans, including many in the center and even some on the right, have negative views of Wall Street and would back tighter regulation. She can speak to goo-goo eyed crowds in Boston and New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, and while she’ll wow the already converted and rake in the money, she won’t be changing anything. But if she can take her message to Des Moines and Louisville and Columbus and Jacksonville and demonstrate that audiences are receptive there, then she’ll break out of the box the media wants to assign her. And if she can do that, she’ll become a figure of un-ignorable influence, and she’ll start making the likes of Clinton really pay attention.
Beinart rejects a comparison bandied about:
The better analogy is not between Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz. It’s been Warren and Rand Paul. Warren’s crusade against Wall Street may appeal to young blue collar Republicans in the same way Paul’s crusade against the national-security state appeals to young liberal Democrats. Both Warren and Paul are exploiting a divide in the other party. Democratic elites are more hawkish on foreign policy than their party’s rank and file; Republicans elites are more pro-Wall Street than theirs.
But Ed Kilgore is unsure how popular her politics would be:
To most Democrats most of the time, Warren is raising important and legitimate concerns about Wall Street that must be addressed, not just dismissed as “class warfare.” To some Democrats some of the time, she represents a decisive break with the Clinton and Obama traditions that is morally necessary.
But let’s don’t pretend there’s a slam-dunk “electability” case for this kind of politics. Yes, the “median voter theorem” of politics that dictates a perpetual “move to the center” by general election candidates has lost a lot of its power just in the last few years. But the countervailing “hidden majority” argument for more ideological politicians of the left and the right is hardly self-evident, and has in the past often been fool’s gold.
Sarah Mimms hears from Republicans who “see Warren as a way to paint the Democratic Party as increasingly beholden to its liberal wing and removed from moderates”:
Warren is hardly the only Dodd-Frank champion among congressional Democrats. And she’s far from alone in opposing the changes pushed by Republicans this week. …
But other members of the Democratic Conference in the Senate aren’t seen as rising stars the way Warren is. Few are considered potential presidential candidates. And none serves as well in the role of liberal specter over the next two years as Warren will, particularly now that she is a member of leadership. “The more exposure she gets, the better for us,” [RNC spokesman Sean] Spicer said. Warren could easily become a poster-woman for the Democratic Party over the next two years, he argued, serving the same purpose as Pelosi and Reid have in Republican advertising and strategy.
Dreher, for one, hopes Warren “will run for president in 2016 to force a national conversation on the Washington-Wall Street power nexus”:
A populist who talks like Elizabeth Warren and really means it is a Democrat a conservative like me would consider voting for, despite her social liberalism. As Phyllis Schlafly said back in 1964, in defending Goldwater against the Establishment Republican Nelson Rockefeller, a contest between Warren and Clinton, and a contest between Warren and just about any Republican would give the country a choice, not an echo. She almost certainly couldn’t beat Hillary for the 2016 nomination, but a Warren candidacy would get her name and her issues out there.
Andrew Prokop doubts it will happen:
[I]f Hillary doesn’t run, or her standing in the polls begins to plummet — it seems conceivable that Warren could heed the calls of various activists and jump into the race. But if Warren thought a presidential bid looked like a promising and appealing prospect under current conditions, she’d be floating the possibility of a run now, like Jeb Bush is. For the moment, it’s best to take her at her word that she’s focused on the Senate.
Larison thinks “it would probably be a better use of Warren’s time to concentrate on her role in the Senate”:
Warren hasn’t even finished her first term in office, and she is just now starting to have some real influence. That role may not be entirely incompatible with running a presidential campaign over the next year or so, but challenging Clinton will inevitably take her away from the job she was elected to do. It is there that she might stand a chance of achieving something. Running around Iowa and New Hampshire might provide the occasion for some interesting primary debates, but it isn’t going to have much of an effect.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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