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How Far Can Elizabeth Warren Go?

The Democratic Party's favorite populist now basks in media and netroots favor, but would face real 2016 obstacles.
Elizabeth Warren Deval Patrick

Another day, another denial. 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. Many reporters broadly share her politics. Perhaps more importantly, they believe her entry would make the race more interesting to cover. A Hillary Clinton coronation would be boring, especially after the upset of 2008.

There also seems to be more genuine liberal enthusiasm for Warren than the other possible challengers: Jim Webb, Jerry Brown, Brian Schweitzer, Bernie Sanders. All of those contenders have the feel of a protest candidate. Warren is someone who could conceivably win the nomination.

Warren is the undisputed leader of the space to the left of Barack Obama in the Democratic Party, which was galvanized by her opposition to the “cromnibus” spending bill. She pointed to a provision that would allow to trade swaps and derivatives, contrary to Dodd-Frank.

This seemingly arcane policy matter became a progressive rallying cry. Deregulation! Wall Street! Another bailout for the banks, even, a line of argument that won some conservative support. (My own view is that Warren is right on the merits but exaggerating the effects.)

Suddenly, liberals were willing to hold up a spending bill and risk shutting down the government. The Democrats willing to follow Warren’s lead against Obama are even less enamored of Hillary. How can she not run?

Warren has been compared to Ted Cruz. Warren’s crusades have a much more obvious endgame, but the comparison isn’t entirely unfair. Both appeal to segments of their party who are spoiling for a fight—with Obama and the establishment in Cruz’s case, with Wall Street and the Democratic moneymen in Warren’s.

These voters and activists want to see such fights waged regardless of the outcome. They think these battles are worth waging for their own sake, and they don’t trust the cooler heads in their own respective parties saying they are futile.

One of Warren’s competitors for the mantle of anti-Hillary benefited from this sentiment. When Jim Webb ran for Senate in 2006, he still had a mostly conservative record. He became a netroots darling not just because he disavowed many of these positions, but because he was seen as taking the fight to the Republicans. (Born Fighting, anyone?)

Both Warren and Cruz derive some of their power from the possibility they might run for president. Maybe they win the nomination; maybe they keep the frontrunner from getting nominated.

But as Sarah Palin understood, this power evaporates the moment you run for president and the grassroots support fails to materialize. And expectations for Warren are high. Could she fail to meet them?

Demography is destiny in the Democratic Party. Warren is close to Hillary in age and would split the votes of those who want to elect the first woman president. She is unlikely to rally black voters the way Obama did. That support was essential to Obama’s (actually quite narrow) victory over Clinton. What would Warren do to compensate for a smaller share of the black vote?

Warren has been surprisingly hawkish on Iran, making it harder to attack one of Hillary’s biggest vulnerabilities. She defended Israel’s last Gaza intervention, a position that probably wouldn’t have hurt her 10 years ago but is not popular among progressives now.

She does support revoking the Iraq War authorization. After initially supporting Obama’s campaign against ISIS in Iraq, Warren has since warned against getting bogged down there. Warren could land some foreign-policy blows on Hillary, but her antiwar credentials are weaker than Webb’s.

Finally, while Warren’s convincing defeat of a fairly popular incumbent to win her Senate seat is nothing to sneeze at, it doesn’t make her a giant-killer. Warren ran well behind Obama in deep-blue Massachusetts. She lost independents and men. If it wasn’t a presidential election year, the contest with Scott Brown would have been much closer—and Warren may well have lost.

Whatever her intentions, Warren may be better off not running, even if 2016 is likely her only chance. But if she continues to capture liberal imaginations, can she really avoid answering the call?

W. James Antle III is editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation and author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?

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