Hillary Clinton appears to have an easy path to winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 should she run, and that has left many liberals and progressive organizations who harbor deep reservations about her frustrated.
An editorial in the liberal Nation headlined “Wanted: A Challenge to Clinton” posted online Tuesday sums up their angst. It doesn’t call for Clinton’s defeat, but it does call for someone to mount a challenge to her from the left. Otherwise, the Nation’s editors fear she will drift away from the liberal agenda.
“The desire for an alternative to Clinton is real [and] … We share that desire,” the editorial reads. “[E]ven the most ardent Hillary supporters should acknowledge that the Democratic Party, and the country, will be better served if she has real competition in the primaries.”
That is an opinion shared by many others on the activist left, says Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Ideally, they would like to see somebody like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., get the nomination.
“Regardless of who runs for president, we’re organizing to ensure every Democratic candidate, including Hillary Clinton, is asked whether they agree with Elizabeth Warren on key economic populist issues,” Taylor told the Washington Examiner.
A November Quinnipiac poll found she was the top choice of just of 57 percent of Democrats, indicating that more than two-fifths of the party were still looking elsewhere for a candidate.
Many liberals have long had an ambivalent attitude toward Clinton. Some remain angered by her husband’s presidency and his policy of “triangulation” between the Left and Right that resulted in welfare reform and free-trade deals like NAFTA.
Hillary Clinton has also been criticized as too cozy with big business. She was once a Walmart board member, for example. Many find her too hawkish on foreign policy. As a New York senator, she supported the Iraq War resolution and subsequently defended it through most of her 2008 presidential bid. As secretary of state, she supported military action in Syria and Libya.
That history has liberals worried she will move even further away from the Left if nobody challenges her. A challenge in the Democratic primary would force her to swing more solidly in their direction.
“This is not an anti-Hillary message; it’s a pro-democracy one. It is about whether the party will speak to the real concerns of voters,” the Nation editors argue.
Clinton has already felt some of that pressure. She campaigned several times with Warren on behalf of other Democrats in the run-up to the midterm elections, often copying the Massachusetts senator’s rhetoric.
Finding a challenger to her will not be easy, though. Warren has repeatedly denied any plans to run, even telling another liberal leader in a “hot mic” moment that “nothing can change my mind.” However, a less-than-ironclad denial in a recent People Magazine interview gave some liberals some hope that she might be reconsidering.
Other potential candidates include Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Congress’s only (avowed) socialist and a staunch critic of Wall Street, and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who eliminated his state’s death penalty while welcoming gay marriage and pushing gun control.
So far, though, former Navy Secretary and Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia is the only Democrat of any prominence to have announced that he is running. While a vocal critic of the Iraq War, Webb also has, like Hillary, a complicated record that likely will give some liberals pause: He was once a Republican, a prominent critic of allowing women to serve in the military and remains an ardent supporter of gun rights.
