David Harsanyi of The Federalist peruses the Democrats’ electoral landscape.
When Elizabeth Warren rallied beleaguered House liberals to push back against a bank-coddling omnibus bill and the spineless White House that enabled it, she showed us some of her dynamic appeal. Her only leverage? An implicit threat to shut down the government. Hypocrisy? Sure. Consider the agitated criticism Warren and her allies threw at Republicans not very long ago. And yes, St. Warren’s righteousness was aimed at some inconsequential riders. Still, passing trillion-dollar pieces of legislation should never be easy, and disrupting the current cozy, bipartisan environment surely can’t be a bad thing.
At the same time, it’s not difficult to imagine Hillary Clinton ensconced in her penthouse suite in whatever city she’s about to give a six-figure lecture in, contemplating every conceivable political angle of this debate, tabulating every potential big-money donor’s interests, and asking obsequious staffers how polling looks before composing her own opinion on the matter. That’s because Hillary is the Democrats’ Mitt Romney. And Democrats would be engaging in a historic act of negligence if they allowed her to run unopposed for presidency.
The most obvious reason bolstering my concern trolling is that Warren’s positions far more closely reflect the sensibilities of constituents in the modern-day Democratic Party, not only in substance, but in tone.
Her hard-left economics—what the press quixotically refers to as “economic populism”—propels today’s liberal argument. It’s the default position of nearly every grassroots constituency on the Left. The center of the Democrats’ agenda. This isn’t just reflected in the embrace of class struggle (“inequality”) but a slow warming to socialistic ideas (and I’m not throwing the word in as invective; I mean it in the most literal way). Right now, few if any politicians are better than Warren at stoking the anxiety that makes that work.
Moreover, Warren, hopelessly wrong as she is, is liable to offer the country a better class of political debate than the one we’ve lived through the past eight years. There’s no doubt hackneyed wars on women, minorities, and common sense will remain. But it’s fair to say that Warren’s histrionics are often built atop genuine policy beefs rather than straw men. They often reflect legitimate questions about cronyism. Not only would Warren compel Hillary to avoid any premature triangulation, her presence in the race might impel Republican candidates to engage in a worthwhile conversation about corporatism and free markets.
