Markos Moulitsas: Power of the populist

The Draft Elizabeth Warren for President movement got a big boost this past week as MoveOn lent its considerable heft to the effort and 400 former Obama campaign staffers signed a joint letter also urging the Massachusetts senator to vie for the White House in 2016. 

The sentiment is understandable. In a party still overly influenced by Wall Street interests, Warren stands tall as a populist defender of Main Street economic values. Videos of her speeches are instant viral hits. Her public appearances draw huge crowds in blue and red states alike. People are looking for a champion of the little guy, and Warren delivers like few others. 

{mosads}Compared to Hillary Clinton, Warren has impeccable populist bona fides. It’s no wonder people pine for a challenge. But it’s not going to happen — Warren has made that clear time and time again. Her reluctance makes perfect sense.

First of all, the math is the math. Polling has shown that Clinton remains popular with the broader party base, consistently polling in the 50s and 60s. A CNN poll several weeks ago showed Clinton leading Warren 65 percent to 10 percent. What’s more, among nonwhite voters, who make up the party’s core growth demographics, Clinton led 76 percent to 4 percent. That’s a much different kind of advantage than 2006, when in December CNN polling she led Barack Obama just 33 percent to 20 percent.

So if Warren ran, it wouldn’t be to win, it would be to make a statement, to try and “push Hillary to the left.” Yet the ability of candidates to influence front-runners is invariably proportional to the danger posed by the challenger, and the numbers don’t suggest much of a danger. Clinton’s safe bet is to move nowhere as long as she maintains her dominant electoral positioning. 

Warren has never embraced the campaign lifestyle, either. I was part of the effort to draft her to run for Senate, and it took a great deal of cajoling, pleading and begging to get her to make that jump despite the fact that she would be running in a geographically compact state, able to sleep in her own bed every night. She would’ve much rather preferred running her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (If Republicans had let her, Scott Brown would still be a senator. From Massachusetts.) 

The good news is that Warren doesn’t need to run for president to have an impact both on the presidential race and on the broader political debate. Warren didn’t need to be a presidential candidate to dominate the airwaves last week as she blasted both the Wall Street giveaway in the “cromnibus” government funding bill and Obama Treasury Department nominee Antonio Weiss, a Wall Street investment banker who’s spent years helping companies like Burger King avoid U.S. taxes by moving their headquarters overseas. 

As the new face of the party’s populist wing, Warren doesn’t lack the ability to garner attention for her priorities, whether in traditional media outlets or social and new media outlets like Facebook or YouTube. And she can do so from a position of substance, rather than the tool of a media desperate to inject some drama into the Democratic primary process (as if the Republican clown-car primary won’t offer enough drama on its own). 

So what should Clinton fear most? An opponent trailing far behind in polling or a liberal icon heckling her from the sidelines, potentially impacting activist base support and intensity? Being an electoral also-ran won’t make Warren more influential than doing what she is already doing, from a position of strength.

Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.