About Elizabeth Warren

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when Elizabeth Warren came out on Rachel Maddow's show and endorsed Hillary Clinton for President and confirmed that she'd be willing to be her Vice President.  There were a lot of posts out exorcising her for abandoning her principles and not being a real progressive and on and on it went.  My main question to all of those people is "What were you really expecting?"

It was obvious to me that Warren's adamant refusal to endorse either Sanders or Clinton during the primary was a sign that she had made a calculation to sit out the mess and side with whoever ended up winning in the end.  As Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism put it

"She has always been focused on her agenda of the welfare of middle class families, and she has been willing to go to war only where she has a mastery of the terrain from a technocratic standpoint, which further narrows her focus."

So, it should really come as no surprise that she decided to sit out a bitter and highly contested primary that played out more as a referendum on what kind of goals and priorities the Democratic party should have instead of who was  the most capable candidate to win a general election.  From my perspective, getting involved in the race did not show any clear long-term benefits for Warren.  If she came out and endorsed Sanders, she probably could've on him the Massachusetts primary, but one more state does not an primary victory make.  Anyone who argues that had Sanders won the primary of a highly progressive state would've then translated to momentum he could've leveraged to win other close primary races are doing nothing more than reading goat entrails that never got cast.

Plus, if she had endorsed Sanders and been on the losing side, she would've gone back to the Senate with the probable President Clinton as an enemy at worst, or a disgruntled emperor who would extract policy concessions on Warrens part in return for not being an active hindrance to her activities in the Senate at best.  If she endorsed Clinton, on the other hand, all that would've happened is that we'd be having the same conversation around her that we're having now, and the senses of betrayal and resentment towards her in the progressive wing of the party would only have longer to grow and fester, which again, would only damage her agenda in the long run since she wouldn't enjoy the popular support to carry it out.

If Sanders had pulled off the miracle and won more delegates, Warren would now be attached to him and would be heralding a new movement for the forgotten middle class along with Sanders, of that I have no doubt.  But, Hillary won, so she went the path of least resistance and since she is firmly in the Democratic Party infrastructure, it does her no good to be butting heads with the leader of said party.  So, she basically looked at the situation and chose the path that, in her mind, put her in a "Win-Win" outcome instead of risking her favor from both sides of the fight.  All that does is make her a politician who bases their decisions on what will benefit their agendas over what puts that agenda at risk .  That people are disappointed in that because they had cast her as the Great New Hope isn't really her fault, since that mold was cast for her by the legions of voters looking for the bare-minimum effort from the Democrats to actually stand for working people like they, you know, are supposed to.

That being said, I don't agree that being VP is the best move for her.  The vice presidency is by design the most useless position in government, their only real job is to just sit around waiting for the President to die so there can be a smooth transition of power.  As far as policy goes, they're only as effective as their President allows them to be, and there is no way in hell a President Clinton going to allow a subordinate to run around attacking the very financial institutions that form the seat of her political power.  The legislative path is the only realistic avenue Warren as to further her policy goals buy introducing and lobbying for Wall Street legislation in Congress and forcing Clinton to make public stances on it.  If, in the end, Clinton does tap her for the VP position, Warren will hopefully  realized that as VP, she would only be a prop with no actual power or ability to sway her boss into doing some good for the world.  If not, then, well, she would've had a good run at least.