Noam Scheiber's overheated New Republic story about a possible Elizabeth Warren primary challenge in 2016 has been shot down over and over again by reporters and others with the knowledge of what it takes to run and how little of that Warren is actually doing. But apparently the Pony Express just delivered Richard Cohen's copy of TNR, because he's writing about the weeks-old flurry of speculation as if it's fresh news -- and he's already proclaiming a failed Warren presidency (or at least a failed Warren wannabe presidency)
... Warren, like the old saying about second marriages, could well be the triumph of hope over experience.Omigod! Warren hasn't even declared her candidacy and there's already a backlash! Maybe we should dump her for Hillary!
Like Obama, before fate and adulation took him to the presidency, Warren is a first-term senator. Like Obama, she has had little involvement in foreign policy....
Like Obama at the same stage, Warren has never run a large organization. She has never been a chief executive or, more to the point, the governor of a state....
The boomlet for Warren shows a yearning for a revival of muscular liberalism. But the Obamacare mess has even some liberals -- the editor of the aforementioned New Republic, for instance -- wondering if this advance in liberalism hasn't in fact set the movement back. To the Democratic left, Warren's heat is the remedy for Obama’s cool. To the rest of the country, she might look like Obama all over again.
But wait, it gets worse. Have people become jaded about the notion of Warren vs. Clinton, while still craving a Hillary Clinton catfight? Jennifer Rubin has a fresh dame to toss into the ring:
They say Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line when it comes to the presidency. If so, a hint of a potential romance might be have been spotted -- in Japan of all places. That is where Caroline Kennedy emerged as the U.S. ambassador to Japan and, for the first time, as a public figure in her own right, perhaps a formidable one.... Granted, she got her ambassadorial post as a political debt belatedly repaid by a president first given political legitimacy on the left through endorsements from Ted Kennedy and and Caroline Kennedy in 2008, but the job is now hers....Stop. Please. Just stop.
Should she segue from Japan to a campaign for an elected post, one can imagine Democrats' collective swoon.
From there, one can easily imagine a run for the Senate or governor (either from Massachusetts or New York). That would place her at the top of any short list for president.
What if, however, she doesn't wait? Could Hillary Clinton be shoved from the limelight twice by Caroline Kennedy? ...
People who want to be president in 2016 are running already. They're making trips to Iowa and South Carolina and New Hampshire. They're schmoozing donors. They're writing books. They're getting friendly journalists to retransmit their pronouncements on issues that no normal human being ever asked them about, and that have nothing to do with their current jobs (or lack thereof).
Caroline Kennedy is not playing this game now, and if she's not playing this game now, she's not going to quit the job she just took on in a few months or a year to make a full-time job of running against the person the vast majority of Democrats would be happy to see run in 2016.
There's a prurience to centrist and conservative commentators' craving for a girl-girl Democratic primary fight. It's politics as stripper Jell-O wrestling. I have nothing but contempt for the pundits who are slavering over the fantasy.
