Clinton vs. Warren?

“HILLARY’S NIGHTMARE.” That’s the cover line for a shrewd and bouncy Noam Scheiber piece in the new issue of the New Republic. The teaser specifies what that nightmare could be: “A DEMOCRATIC PARTY THAT REALIZES ITS SOUL LIES WITH ELIZABETH WARREN INSTEAD.”

I can think of several nightmares that would cost H.R.C. more R.E.M. sleep than an E.W. run for POTUS. But Scheiber is surely right that no one could give the currently prohibitive favorite a tougher run for her money than the first-term (and already senior!) senator from Massachusetts. His case in a nutshell:

    In addition to being strongly identified with the party’s populist wing, any candidate who challenged Clinton would need several key assets. The candidate would almost certainly have to be a woman, given Democrats’ desire to make history again. She would have to amass huge piles of money with relatively little effort. Above all, she would have to awaken in Democratic voters an almost evangelical passion. As it happens, there is precisely such a person. Her name is Elizabeth Warren.

That is indeed her name, and she is indeed an attractive candidate. Interestingly, Warren was a Republican well into her forties (she’s sixty-four, just three years Hillary’s junior)—but, as the saying goes, that could be a feature, not a bug. It makes for a potentially useful party-line-blurring “narrative.” Reagan, too, switched affiliations in midlife. He knew how to talk the other side’s talk, and even as he won the hearts of the far reaches of his adopted party he remained politically bilingual. Warren may turn out to have a similar talent. After all, there are Republicans who are suspicious of the banks, just as there were Democrats who fretted about welfare.

Warren, a onetime schoolteacher who became a professor, is still more schoolmarmy than professorial—and I mean that in a good way. (She reminds me of my beloved fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Summerskill.) When Warren is on her game, she’s almost as good as Hillary’s husband (or Nancy’s) at ’splaining stuff in plain language, above all when she’s talking about her signature issue, financial reform—which, as it happens, is Clinton’s biggest ideological vulnerability with the Democratic-primary electorate.

Scheiber argues that while Warren has no great aversion to the spotlight, her self-aggrandizement is mostly a side effect of her policy passion. The Senate Republicans and their Wall Street allies made a big mistake when they blocked her appointment to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency she conceived and set up for Obama. They now find themselves dealing with her as a member of the Senate Banking Committee, where she is free of the bureaucratic and political constraints that she would have faced as an Administration official.

Will she challenge Hillary? No one knows, probably including Warren herself. Politico followed up on Schreiber’s story—thereby making the Warren possibility officially buzz-worthy—and quoted an e-mail from her press secretary: “Senator Warren has said many times, she is not running for President.” (Of course, that depends on what the meaning of “is” is.) Along with the fifteen other Democratic women in the Senate, Warren signed a letter urging Clinton to go for it. The letter was meant to be a secret, though it was never likely to stay that way. If Warren had been the only non-signer, it would have been seen as tantamount to a declaration of candidacy.

Anyway, urging is not the same as supporting. And Warren’s foreign-policy credentials are, to put it gently, modest. But whether or not she ultimately runs (and, again, even she probably doesn’t know what she’ll do), leaving the possibility tantalizingly open is the best way to keep her ideas about taming the plutocracy in the public eye—and to encourage (or force) Clinton to move in her direction.

Should Hillary Clinton end up heading the Democratic ticket in 2016, she would be the most qualified, most fully prepared, most thoroughly tested non-incumbent major-party nominee for President since Henry Clay. She has spent more than twenty years in the crucible. She didn’t while away her eight White House years walled up in the East Wing convent, First Ladylike. She was a full participant in every important political and policy deliberation and in every crisis, foreign and (in both senses) domestic. She was a successful senator, popular with voters and colleagues alike. While her tenure as Secretary of State yielded no spectacular diplomatic coups, she did the job competently and creatively. Her partnership with President Obama was a political masterstroke for them both. She is as Presidential as they come, and, as Scheiber writes, she sounds increasingly “candidential.” (A nice neologism, that.)

To the extent that Hillary has a problem, though, it may not be only the liberal and populist unease with the Clintons’ history of chumminess with Wall Street—and their role in creating the deregulatory regime that was an indispensable precondition for the 2008 financial crisis and the economic ruin that it has wrought.

Democracies are hardly immune from dynastic adventures. India has its Nehru-Gandhi family, Britain its Pitts, Canada its Trudeaux. America’s own experience with Presidential primogeniture has been both long and mixed. The Adamses, John and John Quincy, were a wash: distinguished personages but poor Presidents. The Harrisons, William Henry and Benjamin, were nothing special—though, to be fair, the former died a month after his inauguration. The Roosevelts were the sole triumph. (Franklin was only a fifth cousin of Teddy, but the name was powerful.) And then there were … the Bushes.

It was not until the final decades of the twentieth century that women were elected to high office in appreciable numbers; each of the three women to serve as state governors before 1976 was either the widow or the wife of her predecessor. There have been forty-four female senators, but fourteen got there by appointment, not by election, including five of the first six. Until the turn of the present century, being a widow, wife, or daughter was the rule, not the exception. Yes, Democrats are eager to make history again. Notwithstanding Hillary Clinton’s outsize accomplishments, though, there is a lingering sense that the history would be grander if the first woman President were someone who reached the top entirely on her own.

A footnote: Hillary Clinton’s prominence points up the remarkable shallowness of the Democratic bench. Whether or not she chooses to run, the supply of plausible alternatives is shockingly thin. The Republicans have an ample roster of men (and only men) who are readily imaginable as nominees, even if thinking about some of them as Presidents (step forward, Ted Cruz) requires thinking about the unthinkable. On the other side, there’s Joe Biden, our septuagenarian Vice-President. There’s Andrew Cuomo—another legacy case. After that, the list drops off rather sharply. Martin O’Malley, governor of Maryland? Sherrod Brown, senator from Ohio? Alec Baldwin? Who else?

Anyone? The floor is open for nominations.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Hendrik Hertzberg