Why Isn’t Elizabeth Warren Running for President?

It is early afternoon on Tuesday, February 2, 2016, and this piece of news analysis has just hit the wires:

Last night, in the Iowa caucus, which began the 2016 Democratic primaries, Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, came close to defeating Hillary Clinton, the party’s front-runner. Ultimately, Clinton prevailed. But O’Malley, who spent a lot of time in Iowa and ran a vigorous campaign seeking to tie his opponent to Wall Street, came within three percentage points of victory. What happens now? Appearing on NBC’s “Today” show from a diner in New Hampshire, where he had flown in the pre-dawn hours, O’Malley said that he was already preparing for the Granite State primary, which takes place on February 9th, a week from today. “This race is wide open,” O’Malley said. “The Democratic Party wants a progressive alternative. America wants a progressive alternative.” Most analysts still think that Clinton will win in New Hampshire, where she is well ahead in the opinion polls, and cement the nomination with primary victories in the Carolinas and in Michigan. But there is another possibility looming. After Clinton’s struggles in Iowa, a number of progressive groups are reviving their calls for Senator Elizabeth Warren to enter the contest. Ready for Warren, a group that has been urging a Warren candidacy since 2014, posted an appeal to the senator on its Web site that read simply, “THIS IS THE TIME.” Repeated calls to Warren’s office weren’t answered, but some observers are speculating that she might be about to turn the 2016 race on its head, possibly by entering next week’s primary in New Hampshire as a write-in candidate. “This could be a version of 1968,” Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said. “You’d have Elizabeth Warren, as a late entrant, playing the role of Robert Kennedy.”

Is this scenario (or something resembling it) a fanciful one? Sure. Is it demented? After what we’ve seen in Washington this past week, not quite.

Right now, the Democratic Party has three leaders: President Obama, who is term-limited; Clinton, the establishment successor-in-waiting; and Warren, whose role is difficult to define, but also increasingly difficult to ignore. Of the three, there’s no doubt who is conveying the most consistent message and generating the most enthusiasm among liberal activists: it’s Warren, with her populist crusade against Wall Street and moneyed interests.

When internal documents emerged that suggested that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York might have gone easy in regulating Wall Street banks, it was Warren who grilled Bill Dudley, the former Goldman Sachs economist who presides over the New York Fed. When the Obama Administration, seeking a new Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, proposed Antonio Weiss, an investment banker at Lazard Frères who has helped companies to arrange deals to move some of their operations overseas for tax purposes, it was Warren who called foul. And when the White House recently signed on to an omnibus spending bill that included a clause, written by a Citigroup lobbyist, that rolled back some of the regulation contained in the Dodd–Frank financial-reform act, it was Warren who rallied the opposition.

Strictly speaking, her efforts were unsuccessful: the spending bill passed. But Warren won the political argument—even some Republicans are reluctant to publicly align themselves with bank lobbyists—and raised her national profile. For days, she was all over the mainstream media, and social media, too. The speech she delivered on the floor of the Senate on Friday evening has been viewed more than a quarter of a million times on YouTube. Also on Friday, more than three hundred people who worked on the Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012 signed a public letter urging Warren to enter the Presidential race. “Rising income inequality is the challenge of our times, and we want someone who will stand up for working families and take on the Wall Street banks and special interests that took down our economy,” the letter said.

On Saturday, Politico’s Katie Glueck posted a story with the headline “Elizabeth Warren Is Catching Fire,” which detailed the excitement about a possible Warren candidacy among attendees at last week’s RootsCamp, a gathering of more than two thousand progressive activists, in Washington, that coincided with the showdown over the spending bill. “This is Elizabeth Warren’s moment,” Ben Wikler, the Washington director for MoveOn, said at a “Draft Warren” panel.

As she has done for months, Warren insists that she isn’t a candidate. “I am not running for President,” she said repeatedly on Monday, in an interview with National Public Radio’s Steve Inskeep, adding at one point: “You want me to put an exclamation point at the end?” But when Inskeep pressed her to change tenses and say that she would never enter the race, she declined.

To Warren’s supporters, her careful language is a source of encouragement. Even if she were entertaining the possibility of entering the race at some point, then biding her time and leaving the door slightly ajar would be a wise strategy. If she jumped in now, or anytime soon, she would immediately be subjected to enormous scrutiny. With a Clinton-versus-Warren primary contest in the offing, surrogates for the Clinton campaign would suggest that Warren is too inexperienced, too narrowly focussed, and too hostile to business to become President. Questions about her Native American family lineage would be exhumed. In short, all hell would break loose.

In saying that she’s not running, Warren can continue to use her prominent position in the Senate to promote the causes she believes in. She can also wait to see if Clinton falters. If that doesn’t happen, Warren can eventually fall in line with the party establishment and help elect the first female President. But if Clinton does stumble badly, in Iowa or before, Warren would still have an opportunity to step in. With her name recognition and army of supporters nationwide, many of them young and tech-savvy, she could quickly raise money and put together an improvised campaign operation.

In the spring of 1968, that’s what Robert Kennedy did. In the New Hampshire Democratic primary, on March 12th, Eugene McCarthy, the liberal, anti-war senator from Minnesota, stunned Lyndon B. Johnson, taking forty-two per cent of the vote to the President’s forty-nine per cent. This shocking result prompted Kennedy to enter the race and Johnson to drop out. By early June, when Kennedy won the California primary, he seemed to be on his way to the nomination. (He was assassinated the day after that primary.)

As I said, the specific historical allusion is a fanciful one—something to toy with over your second cocktail at the office Christmas party, nothing more. But the larger question can’t be dismissed, and that question is no longer: Is Elizabeth Warren running for President? In Democratic circles, the terms of the debate have changed. Increasingly, the question is: Why isn’t Elizabeth Warren running for President?