Hillary Clinton doubtless thinks it would be extremely cool to be the first female President of the United States, and I suppose I do, too.
But: Is there any other good reason for her to run? I’ll be damned if I can think of one.
She has become a vastly more likeable person in her last 25-years of public life, and isn’t nearly so irritating today as she was at the beginning of her husband’s first term. And, by all accounts, she is very smart and hard-working. I think, too, that her heart is in the right place, that she has a sound grip on the devastation of the middle class which has occurred since the 1% reclaimed their Gilded Age ownership of the country.
So why can’t I feel any enthusiasm? I think it’s because she is an inferior administrator — Benghazi, the e-mail thing, for two examples — and her trimming over the years tells me she is just another ambitious but unimaginative hack; nor has she the charisma that effective leadership requires in a media-obsessed age. Given the flat-out insane pack of wannabes amongst the Republicans, however, I can picture myself voting for her — but without enthusiasm, and mostly to deny the Republicans the opportunity to do more damage than they already have over the past decade.
When Wall Street drove the American economy over the cliff in 2008, it should have been evident to anybody with two eyeballs and a functioning brain that stiff economic reforms were needed. But Wall Street spent hundreds of millions to overcome that, and mostly prevailed.
One of the very few people in Congress who had the character to fight them was Elizabeth Warren, and that’s who I would like to see in the Oval Office.
Elizabeth Ann Warren (née Herring; born June 22, 1949) is an American academic and politician who is the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. She was previously a Harvard Law School professor specializing in bankruptcy law. Warren is a prominent legal scholar, and is among the most cited in her field. She is an active consumer protection advocate whose scholarship led to the conception and establishment of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Warren has written a number of academic and popular works, and is a frequent subject of media interviews regarding the American economy and personal finance.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, Warren served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). She later served as Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Barack Obama.
Here is her speech at Netroots Nation, 2014; if you’ve never seen it, watch it now.
There are multiple draft movements afoot, and state committees, and she has invariably responded to those efforts by saying she is not running for the presidency. Let’s hope she changes her mind.