Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas has spoken:
Trust me with this. Elizabeth Warren isn’t running. She wasn’t an eager Senate candidate. It took lots of cajoling and begging to get her to make that race. And if you’re hesitant to mount a Senate campaign in a small state where you can go home and sleep in your bed after a day of campaigning, you aren’t going to want to engage in presidential craziness.
You need an immense ego to run for president, a religious-like certainty that you are the best person IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY OF 314 MILLION to run it. That’s not who Elizabeth Warren is. She’s on a mission, make no mistake, to reform the way Wall Street does business. But she already has a platform to make that happen—a perch in the nation’s Most Exclusive Club and a grassroots army of millions amplifying her voice.
What a relief to read that Moulitsas knows what tomorrow will bring. For a while I thought he might be mulling the pros and cons of someone other than Wall Street’s darling, Hillary Clinton, heading the Democratic ticket in 2016. But that’s almost as silly as thinking he’d own up to being a faux-progressive.
Make no mistake, this guy is being disingenuous as well as patronizing. He pretends to know that Warren won’t run — how would he know her mind? — but what he’s really saying is she shouldn’t run. He’s afraid that, in seeking the nomination, she would wreck the love affair between the Democratic establishment and the Wall Street crooks who tanked the economy in 2008, and that this would be a bad thing.
I’m still looking for logic in The Great Kos’s argument. If Warren is indeed “on a mission… to reform the way Wall Street does business,” then why wouldn’t she consider running for president? Why would she be content to be a voice in the wilderness of the Senate, where only Bernie Sanders and a few others appear to genuinely believe the concerns of the poor and middle-class are more important than those of the obscenely wealthy?
“Given [Warren’s] goals, the Senate is a great place to be,” Moulitsas wrote. This is like saying, “That’s a good girl, Lizzy, sit back in your nice little Senate seat and grouse about income equality and let the old pros run the party, even though they’re as corrupt as the old pros who run the GOP.”
But I’m glad Moulitsas, a long-time apologist for Barack Obama’s disastrous presidency, is so sure Warren will stay put. It means those of us who think she might make a good candidate, and in the process help rescue the Democratic Party from total irrelevance, are probably on the right track.
Footnote: Moulitsas, of course, was fiercely anti-Hillary when she ran against Obama in 2007-08, but likes her now because “she has evolved with the times.” I’m not sure how he’s defining “evolved.”
I’m pondering the meaning of this sentence from the article referenced:
“…“The fact that she makes 2016 uninteresting makes that attractive,” said Markos Moulitsas…”
??? Hopefully for the Democrats, that does not mean ‘let’s nominate somebody who will put everybody into a snooze stupor’, although it kind of says just that.
Maybe it means “let’s nominate somebody who is so much the forerunner that we can afford to paper over some genuine differences in the Party”.
That way, the issues that divide the Big Corporate/Big Money portion of Democratic Leadership – which is really the majority of the leadership – don’t/won’t get aired against the views of those Democratic officeholders who want to adopt more progressive or even populist policies.
The argument might be that such a debate might look nasty or divisive in public, or indicate that the Democrats are not all one big happy family.
I don’t believe that is the way to go for the longer term, though.
Obviously, you hate Kos. Fine. But he might be right — maybe it was really hard to get her into the Senate race in the first place and he genuinely believes that the sudden enthusiasm for a Warren candidacy is misplaced. That doesn’t make him either an idiot or someone who wouldn’t love to see her run. And I don’t see one partial quote from NBC, particularly without more context for that conversation, as a ringing endorsement by Kos for Hillary above other candidates.
Until Warren says she’ll consider it, the recent progressive enthusiasm for the idea does appear to be premature.
Moulitsas knows first hand about evolving. “In the begining” he worked for the CIA. He claims to have quit the agency. But the fact is that, like the Mafia, ‘nobody’ ever quits the CIA. At least nobody that’s still breathing. Is Moulittsas a stalking-horse for the 1%? His rapid “rise to the top,” and his ability to shape-shift relatively quickly on issues and personalities seems to point in that direction. This mind reading act of his is a new wrinkle however. You don’t suppose that Hillary’s Clintonites paid for his transition from an average guy to a psychic with a bag full of money do you?