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.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
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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