Conservatives have been having fun with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s announcement last week that she’s formed an exploratory committee to consider a presidential candidacy next year. And with good reason, I might add: The business of forming “exploratory committees” to ponder decisions already made is, in itself, a comic feature of our campaign fundraising laws.
Indeed, if she had wished to reclaim her maverick status in an ever-widening field of potential candidates Warren might have announced her candidacy outright — and damn the complications. The fact that she chose to comply with Beltway etiquette will remind fellow Democrats of another pioneering female candidate whose cautious and carefully-orchestrated campaign for the White House ended unhappily.
As with any aspirant, of course, Warren has her share of qualities and defects. In a party that is lurching decisively toward the left she is a conventional liberal Democrat with populist credentials — articulate, impassioned, opportunistic. It is true that she represents deep-blue Massachusetts and was, until recently, a member of the faculty at Harvard Law School. But her working-class Oklahoma roots are genuine and, for good or ill, she seems to strike a convenient nerve in President Trump.
To be sure, her claim of Native American heritage is tenuous, at best, and she foolishly (and disastrously) rose to Trump’s bait with her DNA profile. Yet the fact that she may have claimed minority status in her academic career is not likely to prove decisive. Candidates of both parties are routinely accused of benefiting from credentials they didn’t necessarily earn, and have won election anyway.
Of greater concern, to Democrats anyway, are her maladroit political skills. A shrewder, more cynical operator would never have allowed her mouth to be swabbed in order to score debating points against Donald Trump. And on the day of her exploratory-committee announcement she sought to burnish her regular-gal credentials with a cringe-inducing Instagram live stream from the kitchen of her comfortable Cambridge residence (“I’m gonna get me a beer”). Watching her twist the cap off and take a gulp, I almost felt sorry for her.
Still, I would not be so dismissive about Warren’s prospects. To begin with, she benefits from the inconvenient truth that, at this juncture and in these circumstances, the received wisdom about front-runners and sure-winners is almost invariably wrong. The Beltway consensus is useful for fundraising purposes, and makes life easier for journalists. But figures as disparate as Jeb Bush (2016) and the late Edmund Muskie (1972) have also shown that the Beltway consensus is largely opinion, not fact.
At the moment, according to the polls, the 69-year-old Warren is some distance behind the 76-year-old Joe Biden, the 77-year-old Bernie Sanders, and the 46-year-old Beto O’Rourke. All three gentlemen, however, carry some uncomfortable baggage.
Biden’s first presidential candidacy ended as long ago as 1987 when he was found to have plagiarized a speech from the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock; when last heard from (2016) he was reluctant to challenge Hillary Clinton. Sanders’s Vermont-style socialism seems to have awakened the latent radicalism of the Democratic party. But the Clinton wing is not likely to have forgotten the damage he inflicted on their heroine two years ago, and in 2020, Sanders will be in his 80th year, nearly two decades older than Dwight D. Eisenhower at the end of his presidency.
O’Rourke’s relative youth appears to offer some romantic appeal to star-struck Democrats. Historically, however, losing a winnable Senate race is not an ideal credential.
Warren’s liabilities are, by contrast, comparatively trivial. Ancestry notwithstanding, her life’s journey from Oklahoma to Massachusetts was by way of Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, states with a measure of electoral significance, and her status as a champion of middle-class consumers and displaced industrial workers resembles a liberal variation of Trumpism.
Unlike, say, Sanders and Biden, she has made few enemies within her own party. Nor, by any measure, is she a Clinton-style New Democrat. The ideas currently animating Democrats, and agitating incoming members of Congress, are ideas most closely identified with Warren. Not least, she is better known than potential rivals such as Sen. Sherrod Brown or Gov. Terry McAuliffe and has broader appeal than Michael Bloomberg or Sen. Kamala Harris.
None of this means that Warren will overcome her handicaps, or more likely, beat an insurgent yet to be identified. But the press and her competitors dismiss her at their peril, as will any Republican opponent, whoever that is.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
