On Sunday the Boston Globe printed an opinion column from MoveOn’s Anna Galland in which she urged Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run for president:
Our country will be better off if she does. She would be a strong candidate — one who injects valuable ideas into the conversation and ensures the kind of debate our country needs. And she could win. Put simply, this moment was made for Elizabeth Warren.
The Globe also published a piece by Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent Joshua Green in which he began by wistfully observing, “Although she took her time doing it, Elizabeth Warren seems to have finally convinced the panting obsessives of the Washington press corps that she isn’t going to run for president next year. Her decision is a big loss for Democrats…“, before (somewhat oddly) proceeding to list all the reasons he thought Warren should run anyway.
And the Globe published an essay from The American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner in which he predicted that if Sen. Warren ran for president, “she would take the party rank-and-file by storm“. This after his opening assertion, “I take Elizabeth Warren at her word that she doesn’t want to run for president in 2016 and is unlikely to become a candidate any time soon“.
To top it off (actually, to lead it off—the Globe printed this editorial above the fold and on the front page of its “Ideas” section, when its customary practice is to keep editorials inside, at the end of the section), the Globe ran an editorial calling on, nay, beseeching Sen. Warren to reconsider her decision not to run for president, concluding (somewhat weakly) that “Warren could enrich the political process for years to come” if she did change her mind.
Other people have made this point more quickly and more articulately than I, but this is bad advice to Warren that comes off as an embarrassing combination of hometown boosterism and out-of-touch liberal Massachusetts arrogance.
Sen. Warren—remarkably for a freshman senator—effectively controls Democratic appointments to high-ranking banking and finance positions (e.g., the Federal Reserve and Dept. of Treasury) in the Obama administration. On the issues she cares about, she not only can get media attention any time she speaks, she also has the power to bend almost any piece of legislation towards the ends she supports. It makes no sense for her to give up that power for a quixotic campaign against a hugely (unprecedentedly) popular party leader.
