Why Warren Won't Run

[Barry]

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

[Shepherd]

This article has a ring of truth to it, which saddens me. What does it say about our nation that at least one of the three best potential candidates for the presidency--along with Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich, in my opinion--is not likely to run?

I think it indicates that the U.S. is in for further decline, especially at the national level and in terms of real leadership on behalf of the people. If this is so, it becomes even more important to localize even more, especially with issues such as securing sources of food and water, and knowing one's neighbors. For me, it indicates the importance of groups such as the California Grange, Transition, Village Building Convergence, CAFF and other groups working to connect people. With our unpredictable futures, I think it is especially important to have neighborhood-based groups, partly so that in times of crises people can walk and bike to connect with people they know.

Isolation and separation have become characteristics of American life. This is not something new, but it seems to be a trend that is worsening. "The Lonely Crowd: A Study of The Changing American Character" was published back in l950 and was one of the first books to reveal this tendency.

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— ...
Read more: https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...#ixzz3OHIR18vl