David Harsanyi commentary: Warren’s populist crusade could edge out Clinton
12/22/14

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren rallied beleaguered House liberals to push back against a bank-coddling omnibus bill and the spineless White House that enabled it, she showed us some of her dynamic appeal. Passing trillion-dollar pieces of legislation should never be easy, and disrupting the current cozy, bipartisan environment surely can’t be a bad thing.

As Warren was disrupting D.C., it’s not difficult to imagine Hillary Clinton ensconced in her penthouse suite in whatever city she’s about to give a six-figure lecture in, contemplating every conceivable political angle of this debate, tabulating every potential big-money donor’s interests and asking obsequious staffers how polling looks before composing her own opinion on the matter. That’s because Hillary is the Democrats’ Mitt Romney. And Democrats would be engaging in a historic act of negligence if they allowed her to run unopposed for president.

The most obvious reason bolstering my concern trolling is that Warren’s positions far more closely reflect the sensibilities of constituents in the modern-day Democratic Party, not only in substance but in tone.

Her hard-left economics — what the press quixotically refers to as “economic populism” — propel today’s liberal argument. It’s the default position of nearly every grass-roots constituency on the left, the center of the Democrats’ agenda. This is not just reflected in the embrace of class struggle (“inequality”) but a slow warming to socialist ideas (and I’m not throwing the word in as invective; I mean it in the most literal sense). Right now, few, if any, politicians are better than Warren at stoking the anxiety that makes that work.

...But it’s fair to say that Warren’s histrionics are often built atop genuine policy beefs rather than straw men. They often reflect legitimate questions about cronyism. Not only would Warren compel Hillary to avoid any premature triangulation but also her presence in the race might impel Republican candidates to engage in a worthwhile conversation about corporatism and free markets.

On a practical level, Warren has simply one thing to think about: Hillary is beatable — very beatable....

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/editorials/2014/12/22/warrens-populist-crusade-could-edge-out-clinton.html