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ove her or hate her, Elizabeth Warren knows exactly who she is. When she took tennis lessons years ago, Warren hit so many balls over fences, hedges and buildings that her instructor—now her husband—considered her his worst student ever. “Once I had a weapon in my hand, I gave it everything I had,” she explained in her autobiography.
Today, the Massachusetts senator is deploying seemingly every political weapon at her disposal in defense of the middle class—and, in typical fashion, giving it everything she’s got. Aggressive, intense, single-minded—she is all of these, and that’s why she’s considered such a formidable advocate for families trying to survive on what she calls “the ragged edge.” But for all the same reasons, Warren would be miscast in the roles of presidential contender and president—and why would liberals want her to take that road, anyway? Warren’s attention would be diverted in a thousand different directions by a campaign. If she somehow managed to dethrone Hillary Clinton and win the White House, say good-bye to public dressings-down of Wall Street executives at Senate hearings and—most likely—to no-holds-barred attacks on “sleazy lobbyists,” “cowardly politicians” and banks that cheat families.
Being president, or even just running for president, would dilute what the left loves best about Warren and also, perhaps, what the nation needs most from her. Being speculated about as a candidate for president, on the other hand, sometimes can be useful. Back in 1991, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia told me he did not discourage speculation about a run for president because he was thrilled by the attention it generated for his ideas on health policy. So it is with Warren. She remains vastly influential as long as she retains her unique role in the national conversation. But if she actually were to run, all that would change. And her record so far suggests she knows it.
Warren often seems exasperated by all the presidential talk—and at the end of 2013, she pledged to serve out her Senate term—but more recently she has been playing a minimalist version of the speculation game. She is sounding less certain about what’s ahead, and she consistently uses the present tense in her repeated denials of interest, conspicuously avoiding a Shermanesque vow never, ever to run or serve.
Even these slight openings have been succor for the draft-Warren movement launched last month by MoveOn.org and Democracy for America. Giving the keynote this week at the AFL-CIO’s first National Summit on Wages, Warren also sounded like she was consciously leading a national movement, repeatedly declaring “what we believe” is needed to take back the economy from politicians who “made deliberate choices that favored those with money and power.”
Yet if one looks more closely at what Warren is doing than what she is saying, very little of it suggests that she is thinking about the presidency at all. She has doubled down on her longtime causes instead of broadening her portfolio in ways that are typical preparation for a presidential run. Her rhetoric, meanwhile, is as sharp and confrontational as ever. Congress should have “broken you into pieces,” Warren said of Citigroup recently on the Senate floor. In one of her final fundraising emails of 2014, she vowed to continue her fight for “accountability and a level playing field so nobody steals your purse on Main Street, or your pension on Wall Street.”
She is also 65 years old, and if it’s not going to happen now, it may be never.
***Warren’s rise from obscure law professor into fiery national advocate for the disadvantaged has hardly been an accident,
Read more: https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...#ixzz3OHIR18vl
