In a sane world, this report from BuzzFeed's Ruby Cramer would quell the Clinton/Warren catfight rumors that have pulses races throughout the Beltway:
Elizabeth Warren's former national finance chair, Paul Egerman, has told several inquiring donors this month that, despite runaway speculation and a burning desire from the party's left wing, the freshman senator will not run for president in 2016.There's more at the link, and it all points to a no answer from Warren.
Egerman, close to both Warren and to the heavy-hitting liberal base of funders who helped her raise $42 million last year, has been approached by donors in the last two weeks and told them that, no, Warren is not planning to run, according to two major players in Democratic financial circles who spoke with Egerman directly.
One Democratic fundraiser said he spoke with Egerman roughly two weeks ago, after articles by Peter Beinart in the Daily Beast and Noam Scheiber in the New Republic heightened fervor amongst the progressives over whether Warren would challenge Hillary Clinton, already the presumed frontrunner, from the left.
Egerman, the fundraiser said, quickly threw cold water on the theory.
"It's not gonna happen," the source said....
But the believers just won't stop:
Here's why it doesn't matter if Warren or her fundraisers say she's not running in 16: she cant possibly know herself http://t.co/eh2Hs1hHv7
— Noam Scheiber (@noamscheiber) November 18, 2013
This links to a Hendrik Hertzberg post at The New Yorker's site, which offers no evidence that Warren is uncertain about her own plans, merely an assertion that the future is (seemingly) unknowable:
Will she challenge Hillary? No one knows, probably including Warren herself....Hertzberg goes on to speculate that "leaving the possibility tantalizingly open is the best way to keep [Warren's] ideas about taming the plutocracy in the public eye -- and to encourage (or force) Clinton to move in her direction." Bill Scher has similar thoughts:
(... even she probably doesn't know what she'll do)....
Has more influence this way, can threaten news with single potshot MT @ABWashBureau Warren stillplayer in '16, just not in actually running
— Bill Scher (@billscher) November 18, 2013
@billscher @ABWashBureau Fragging her own? I think you have her confused with Ted Cruz, temperamentally.
— Steve M. (@nomoremister) November 18, 2013
@nomoremister @ABWashBureau But I think the threat of a EW potshot does more to keep HRC in line than actually running & barely cracking 30.
— Bill Scher (@billscher) November 18, 2013
So does she simply not know what her plans are (at a time when every other candidate is already laying groundwork)? Is she faking, in part to keep Hillary Clinton on a short leash?
That last notion annoys me -- it suggests that her prime target is a fellow Democrat. It seems to me that Warren is mature enough to know that the prime target in her war on fat-cat excess is, um, fat cats. To put it in Python terms, she's a People's Front of Judea member who's actually angrier at the Romans than she is at the Judean People's Front:
I've never seen any evidence that she thinks policing her party for signs of ideological impurity is a good use of her time. She's not Jim DeMint, nor is she an emoprog. She's in this to take on the powerful, not to take on the people who won't take on the powerful. And good for her.