Elizabeth Warren isn’t running

And if you read this Politico interview, you’ll begin to understand why. It’s really long, go read the entire thing:

In an interview, Warren maintained, with a dismissive sweep of her hand before the question could even be posed, that the White House thing just isn’t going to happen. And she pushes back, hard, when we suggest that she is using her hard-won national platform merely to pull Clinton to the left in 2016. “You are framing it, in a sense, too narrowly,” she says. “No, the question for me is how can we change, how to make this country change, how to get this country back on a path where people can build real economic security.”

As for Warren’s own path? “She’s much, much too smart to run for president,” says her friend and ally, former Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, who co-authored the Wall Street regulation bill passed after the 2008 financial crisis that included Warren’s signature initiative, a consumer board that looks after the interests of bank and credit-card customers. “She has no chance to win—none—and she would kill her credibility if she did. She’s devoted her life to issues that she cared about, and the second people perceive her as ambitious, you know, interested in running, that’s over.”

[…] But conquering the Senate, that marble-columned killing field of legislative ambition, has proved to be a far tougher task for Warren in her first two years. She has tried unsuccessfully to complete big deals on issues like student loan reform and housing. And her relationship with the White House, strained in recent years, has turned downright frosty thanks to her vow, transmitted to Obama and his top staff directly, to block the appointment of bankers to key posts. Here, too, as in her relationship with Clinton, Warren is trying to mix the inside with the outside games, hoping to “retain her purity without, you know, turning into Ted Cruz,” in the words of one senior Obama administration official.

But is it really possible to be both an ideologue, and a player, in today’s Washington?
“Sooner or later, you have to go produce something,” says West Virginia’s conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who tried and failed to get Warren’s support for a compromise deal that would cut interest rates on student loans. “You gotta say, ‘I did something.’ It’s one thing to just keep throwing the red meat out there and say, ‘Boy, I fed the lions today, they’re happy.’”