Clinton vs. Warren?

Hendrik Hertzberg | newyorker.com
15 Nov 2013

Warren was a Republican well into her forties (she’s sixty-four, just three years Hillary’s junior)—but, as the saying goes, that could be a feature, not a bug. It makes for a potentially useful party-line-blurring “narrative.” Reagan, too, switched affiliations in midlife. He knew how to talk the other side’s talk, and even as he won the hearts of the far reaches of his adopted party he remained politically bilingual. Warren may turn out to have a similar talent. After all, there are Republicans who are suspicious of the banks, just as there were Democrats who fretted about welfare.
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When Warren is on her game, she’s almost as good as Hillary’s husband (or Nancy’s) at ’splaining stuff in plain language, above all when she’s talking about her signature issue, financial reform—which, as it happens, is Clinton’s biggest ideological vulnerability with the Democratic-primary electorate. 

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Should Hillary Clinton end up heading the Democratic ticket in 2016, she would be the most qualified, most fully prepared, most thoroughly tested non-incumbent major-party nominee for President since Henry Clay. She has spent more than twenty years in the crucible. She didn’t while away her eight White House years walled up in the East Wing convent, First Ladylike. She was a full participant in every important political and policy deliberation and in every crisis, foreign and (in both senses) domestic. She was a successful senator, popular with voters and colleagues alike. While her tenure as Secretary of State yielded no spectacular diplomatic coups, she did the job competently and creatively. Her partnership with President Obama was a political masterstroke for them both. She is as Presidential as they come, and, as Scheiber writes, she sounds increasingly “candidential.” (A nice neologism, that.) 

To the extent that Hillary has a problem, though, it may not be only the liberal and populist unease with the Clintons’ history of chumminess with Wall Street—and their role in creating the deregulatory regime that was an indispensable precondition for the 2008 financial crisis and the economic ruin that it has wrought. 

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