Posted on 12/15/2014 11:05:20 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Elizabeth Warren’s weekend heroics have endeared her even more to the Democratic base, and it’s time Hillary started getting worried.
Are future historians going to look back on the past weekend as the one in which Elizabeth Warren took over the Democratic Party? She didn’t win the fight she led over the weekend to have the provision weakening the Dodd-Frank law stripped out of the spending bill, but she was never going to win that vote. What she did win, though, was the ever-more intense ardor of her growing number of liberal fans. They’d march with her over hot coals. There’s no other Democrat in the country with that kind of following.
So it’s hardly impossible that Warren could come to be the leader of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton, who hasn’t been cutting an inspiring figure across the landscape of late, makes a few more “dead broke” missteps. Warren decides to run after all. The two go head to head through the primaries, but somehow Warren taps into Democrats’ emotional nerve-endings in a way Clinton simply can’t, and she becomes the nominee. And then...
As I said, that’s hardly an insane scenario, and it’s one Clinton should heed, and heed pretty quickly. The general assumption has been that Warren won’t challenge Clinton, and that’s probably correct. But Warren is well aware of how adoring and numerous her followers are and how much leverage that gives her in the party, and what she wants is to push the party to embrace her economic views. I doubt she really expects that she can be elected president, and I wonder if she even would really want the gig (she’s shown practically no interest in foreign policy, and that is destined to be by far the hardest and most hair-graying part of the job). But if she becomes convinced that challenging Clinton is the best—or only—way for her to maximize her leverage, then she might just do it.
Surely, after this last week, she can’t be blamed if she’s feeling a bit more intoxicated. After watching her astounding call to break up Citigroup, her admirers have been rushing forth with pleas and petitions for her to run. Referring to Citi’s role in the lobbying effort to get that anti Dodd-Frank provision put in the spending bill Congress just passed, Warren said on the Senate floor last Friday: “If a financial institution has become so big and so powerful that it can hold the entire country hostage, that alone is reason enough to break them up. Enough is enough. Enough is enough, with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position, and the kind of cronyism that we have seen in the executive branch. Enough is enough, with Citigroup passing eleventh-hour deregulatory provisions that nobody takes ownership over but everybody will come to regret.”
I can’t remember the last time a prominent senator issued such a direct challenge to one of America’s leading corporations. That kind of talk went out of style long ago, in favor of the corporate leg-spreading so much more typical of our campaign-cash-obsessed era. Warren doesn’t need their money and represents a state where, barring a weird scandal, she can get reelected as long as she wants, so she can do what depressingly few senators can—speak her mind on money issues.
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.
But Clinton should be paying attention anyway. The feeling I sense right now about Clinton is: not very much real excitement, and just the slightest bit of resentment at her inevitability. She seems a little remote. She comments, sometimes, on issues that arise, but it always seems to take her a little longer than it ought to. She has a Twitter feed, but she tweets about once a week, and it’s always a total snooze. Why shouldn’t she—who needs to find ways to make people forget she’s nearly 70—use Twitter to comment on the news, and say some interesting and edgy things?
Those come under symbolism. Substantively, Clinton needs to see that what Warren represents is real and, once she starts taking positions, take some that demonstrate that she hears what these exasperated millions are trying to say about inequality and the rigged system. No one expects her to be Elizabeth Warren, but everyone expects Clinton to hear and respect Warren. If she doesn’t send convincing signals that she does, then Warren may well feel that she needs to run after all. The choice is Clinton’s.
The MSM have gotten their marching orders!
First Obama and now Lizzy Warren... The Democrats are the party of the “What’s Happening Now” mentality, and Hillary is so not now.
....Warren lost.
Fine, let them run an ultra-lib in 2016. We’re ready.
Ultra Lib=OK
Ultra Conservative=How COULD they? OMG we’re all gonna die!!!
Elizabeth Warren ,will the voters be tricked into a Third Term for Obama ?
This is just indicative that the left wing of this country starts with the Country Club republicans.
Citi bank doesn’t have the political grip on D.C. that Goldman Sachs has,but Warren didn’t mention them. Democrats know where their bread is buttered.
Meh...I remember when Hillary was “inevitable.”
Heck...I remember when Teddy was “inevitable!”
Boehner?
Do you realize that if 10 "Yes Republicans" had joined the Injun Gal on the traitor vote, we could have stopped it?
A Wendy Davis moment. The results do not matter, a star is born. She got nothing, but the left will celebrate her greatness.
Come to think of it, it's sort of like Obama's meaningless speech pre-Iraq war when he was a back-bench state senator. The speech had no purpose, but it became the rallying point of the far left.
Here is the curveball. Think about all the recent Bush/Clinton lovey dovey cr@p talk about "brothers form another mother, etc. Now, think about how a Clinton/Bush alliance would work behind the scenes against the Obama cabal, that technically stole the mantle from the Clintons.
Will make for interesting theatrics to see where the Clinton and Bush operatives fall in line. Watch closely.
Pelosi is ging to be really pissed!
Hillary got aced by Obama and if she gets aced by Warren,she will be one enraged lady no telling what might happen.
I suggest it won’t be pretty, but lets not give away the ending...
Freegards
LEX
The convince themselves that it's not their policies but the right people were not in charge, but the new leader is so much smarter and/or less corrupt than anyone that has tried and failed before, therefore he/she/it will make it work this time.
Previously Obama's nickname was "The One", now that he failed, Fuaxahontis is the one, if she gets in and when she fails someone else will be the one
Honest to goodness, they’re such twits. The latest shiny bauble empty suit, and they’re wetting themselves. The problem is, a goodly amount of the time they convince enough low information types to join in the fun.. That plus their media propagandists and the next Republican drip candidate and presto we destroy our republic.
Elizabeth Warren, aka: Obama in a dress.
Oh, my God. What a pathetic toady!
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