Here’s a question for Joan Walsh. If you’re a progressive Democrat who doesn’t support Hillary Clinton, what are you supposed to do? Now, I know that you suggest that progressives get behind Bernie Sanders or Sherrod Brown or Kirsten Gillibrand, but they all suffer from the same basic flaw that you’ve identified with Elizabeth Warren: they haven’t “done anything to build an organization in any of the early primary or caucus states.”
It’s true that Bernie Sanders has at least indicated a willingness to consider getting in the race, but he’s not exactly as compelling as a potential candidate as Elizabeth Warren. The problem for people who don’t support Hillary isn’t that Warren might not run. The problem is that no one of her stature seems likely to run.
Sherrod Brown and Kirsten Gillibrand are good alternatives, but they aren’t any more likely to challenge Clinton than Warren. So, why not try to convince the strongest potential challenger to get into it?
Sure, it can begin to look like a cult of personality, but anyone who is going to have a snowball’s chance in hell against the Clintons is going to need some fanatical supporters.
I’m willing to listen to alternatives, but what’s going on here is that there is a hunger for someone who can do more than offer a token resistance to Clinton’s nomination.
The alternative to this is to somehow try to find a way to move Clinton to the left without having a credible threat in the form of an actual challenger. How the hell can that be done?
There are some other issues here to consider, including the idea that Clinton could position herself in a way that is surprisingly more satisfactory than most progressives expect. I see this as a real possibility on domestic issues, but I truly doubt we’ll see the same in foreign policy.
Another thing to consider is that Clinton can say all the progressive things in the world but what will really determine how far she goes is what kind of congresses she’ll deal with when she’s the president. Progressives might do better by focusing less on the presidential race, which seems to be a lost cause already, and more on getting likeminded politicians elected to the House and Senate.
What’s clear, though, is that progressives do not want a third term of Clintonism and they’re getting shut out of the debate before it even begins. For organizations like MoveOn.org and Democracy for America, they can’t just fall in line for a Clinton coronation and maintain their credibility with their members. That doesn’t mean that they will wind up hostile in the end. After all, Howard Dean has already endorsed Clinton, so how oppositional is DFA really going to be?
So, yeah, the Draft Warren movement is partly about people maintaining their progressive credentials with their members, but that’s because their members aren’t sold on Clinton. Without a vessel for their discontent, the next step is apathy.
What really needs to be hashed out here is what progressives find objectionable about a Clinton presidency, because the objections vary a lot depending on who you’re talking to. And some of that old hostility might be misplaced. Clinton isn’t going to reintroduce the Defense of Marriage Act. She probably isn’t going to be all about deregulating Wall Street. This isn’t 1996 anymore.
On the other hand, there are those trade agreements. There’s that foreign policy. There are some questions about character. And age and health.
Just on the most basic level, progressives would like a seat at the table while the party figures out what it is going to be in the post-Obama era. But what good is a seat at the table if it sits empty because we don’t have anyone to represent us?
So, in the absence of better alternatives, people keep asking Elizabeth Warren to get into the race. It might not be productive in the end, and it wouldn’t necessarily change all that much even if the effort were successful. But when you complain about it, you’re basically asking people to either shut up and get on the Clinton bandwagon or your just telling them to shut up, period.
To be clear, I don’t want to have some divisive primary that tears the left apart and leaves us vulnerable to the complete disaster of a Republican presidency coupled with a Republican Congress.
But I don’t want to be completely shut out. I can tell you right now that shutting us out will take all the energy, brains, and creativity out of the equation and leave the left on autopilot, utterly reliant on metrics and poll-testing.
If you want another consultant-dominated campaign, well, you saw what that got the Clintons back in 2008.
It would still probably be good enough to beat the Republicans, but maybe not.
Why take that chance?