Elizabeth Warren walks through a crowd of supporters after winning the delegate vote to become the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate at the Democratic State Convention in Springfield, Mass. on Saturday, June 2, 2012. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
For many in the Democratic Party, a second Clinton presidency seems to be inevitable. Despite general misgivings about the former secretary of state’s management style or the sense of creeping dread among some of a return to “Clinton Politics” to the Beltway, many feel there is no one on the scene who could deny Hillary Clinton a return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, should she want it.
For those who remember the 2008 election, however, there is an understanding of how the inevitable can be quickly diverted. Barack Obama, an obscure former Illinois state senator in the first half of his first term as an United States senator, managed to capitalize on the mistakes of the former first lady and — on the promise of hope — collapse that perceived inevitability. Amid the media speculation whether Clinton will run a second time for the highest office in the land, many are asking if lightning can strike the same person twice.
According to polls, Clinton is the runaway favorite for the presidency in 2016. In every hypothetical challenge against every hypothetical challenger by every polling organization that posed the 2016 question, Clinton has won definitively — not losing a single poll to date. For example, in a Nov. 7 – 10 NBC News poll, 44 percent said they would support Hillary Clinton, while 34 percent would support Chris Christie in a 2016 general election match up. The rest of respondents either preferred another candidate, said they would not vote, or were undecided.
“66 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning respondents say they’d back Clinton in a Democratic primary, versus just 14 percent who say they’d vote for another candidate,” the poll indicated.
But if lightning were to strike twice, and Clinton were thwarted in a second attempt at the presidency — who would be the individual to deny her? In a Nov. 10 New Republic article, Noam Scheiber argues that the best suited to play spoiler in 2016 is the freshman senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren.
The other candidate
Warren, who was blocked by the Senate Republicans from being seated as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency she helped created, was well-known prior to taking her seat on the Senate floor — particularly, for her attacks on then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Upon being sworn in as senator, many speculated exactly what type of senator Warren would be. Some thought she’d perhaps resemble Hillary Clinton or Al Franken (D – Minn.).
During her first banking committee hearing, however, Warren made her presence known. Politely waiting until her turn to ask questions, she asked the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the assembled bank regulators, “Tell me a little bit about the last few times you’ve taken the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street all the way to a trial.” The response? Utter silence. Prior to this, bank regulators were spared the embarrassment of answering such direct questions. In exchange, Congress members are allowed to make sweeping face-saving denouncements without actually making any changes or being rebutted by the experts.
Her point-blank confrontation — the first of many in her short career — has put as many allies as foes at unease. Her direct, focused approach has made many recognize that Warren is more about the message than the messenger. Built on sympathies she developed as a child, such as watching her mother work to feed her family after her father took ill, there is a real sense that Warren means what she says and does what she believes, and it’s this that could make Warren a challenger to Clinton.
“Most of the pundits, operatives, and donors who populate the presidential-campaign industry assume Warren will not run for president in 2016 if Clinton does,” Scheiber wrote. “They believe taking her on would be a suicide mission at best—harmless to Clinton but career-ending for the challenger. When I asked Swanee Hunt, an influential donor to both Warren and Clinton, about the possibility of Warren running, she told me: ‘I know three other women [besides Hillary] who would be very credible primary candidates. But none of them is going to challenge Hillary. . . . These women are not stupid.’ If Clinton took a pass, on the other hand, many believe Warren would be difficult to beat, and the pressure to run could be irresistible.
“This type of analysis is almost always correct: It assumes that a politician will maximize her chances of getting elected president. But it fundamentally misunderstands Warren,” Scheiber continued. “While her ambitions are considerable, they have always been focused on advancing her economic agenda. Everything from her public denunciations of Clinton to her lobbying to lead the CFBP, to her eventual Senate run was motivated by a zealous attachment to the cause that has preoccupied her since childhood, not necessarily an interest in holding office. In October of 2010, Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor, was launching a show on CNN and was thrilled to land Warren as his inaugural guest. But Spitzer planned to open the broadcast calling for Geithner’s head and worried that his monologue might violate some delicate protocol. Geithner was officially Warren’s boss at Treasury, after all. He held a key vote over whether she would run the consumer agency. But when Spitzer offered to skip the diatribe, Warren didn’t even pause to mull it over. “No, it’s fine with me,” she told him flatly.”
Clinton’s bankers problem
One of the key problems facing Clinton is the notion of “Clinton Democrats” — wealthy bankers, industrialists and personalities who, while promoting the populist tones of workers’ rights and individual equality, seek protections to the free market and to their rights to cultivate wealth. Such supporters have always been essential to a Clinton campaign and are needed to fill the war chest Clinton will need to run.
But similar to the Right, there has been an anti-bank, anti-big business coalition forming among the Democrats. Warren, a hero to many of the Left’s breakaway movements — including Occupy and Anonymous — can be seen as an answer to the party’s populist sentimentality.
“The nightmare scenario for banks is to hear these arguments from a candidate on the far left and on the far right,” said Jaret Seiberg, a financial services industry analyst at Guggenheim Partners. “Suddenly you have Elizabeth Warren screaming about ‘too big to fail’ on one side, and Rand Paul screaming about it on the other side, and then candidates in the middle are forced to weigh in.”
A Warren charge at bedrock issues such as student loans, credit card fees, the minimum wage, “too big to fail banks,” and executive pay during the campaign could make Clinton decidedly uneasy. She, in response, would likely move to the Left to mitigate Warren’s posturing, exposing the Center for assumption by the Republican candidate. While a Warren candidacy would ultimately drive Wall Street to Clinton, it may also bring up long-forgotten ghosts of the Clintons’ allegiances to the 1 percent.
“A Warren candidacy would bring a fresh level of scrutiny to both Hillary and Bill Clinton’s relationships with Wall Street, and they will have to deal with that,” said a progressive Democrat sympathetic to Warren, who declined to be identified. “There is a clear tension between what the Clintons say and what lines their pockets. They have become fabulously, unimaginably wealthy” in part through speeches to banking groups.
A reluctant challenger
Warren, who has taken an almost cynical view of Washington and politics-as-usual, may be a breath of fresh air for a Democratic Party that recently saw Bill de Blasio win overwhelmingly the mayoral seat for New York City on a platform of income equality. As class becomes the arching theme for modern-day politics, Clinton may seem out-of-touch compared to someone like Warren.
“I’ve been in the Senate for nearly a year and believe as strongly as ever that the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families,” Warren said in recent remarks to the National Consumer Law Center. “We could talk about a lot of ways the system is rigged — lobbyists, campaign finance, the court system. But I want to raise a very specific issue that we need to spotlight: how much powerful interests benefit from a system that is complicated and opaque.”
At 64 and still a relative outsider to Washington, Warren’s one and perhaps best shot for the White House may be 2016. Despite the fact that Warren has indicated that she does not want to run for president — she had to be pushed to run for senator — and despite the fact that Warren has went out of her way to downplay rumors she may be running for president, the idea remains an attractive one.
But in practical terms, Warren is eclipsed by Clinton’s cult of personality. Unlike Warren, Clinton is a known quantity — having served in politics for more than thirty years — and despite Clinton being an integrated part of the “Washington machine,” Clinton is generally held to be even-leveled, respected enough to lead bipartisanly, and strong enough to break down obstructions. While she is not the populist Warren is or Obama was during his campaign, Clinton is the realist many feel the nation needs to lead.
But the presence of Warren on the campaign trail may be enough to change the equation. “Embracing Warren as the next ‘one’ is, in part, a way of getting over Obama; she provides an optimistic distraction from the fact that under our current president, too little has changed, for reasons having to do both with the limitations of the political system and the limitations of the man,” wrote Rebecca Traister for the New York Times. “She makes people forget that estimations of him were too overheated, trust in his powers too fervid.”
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