What will Warren do?
By NBP Staff | February 12, 2016, 9:55 EST
Inquiring minds want to know: Why hasn’t Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren endorsed Hillary Clinton?
After all, she’s a woman – the only woman out of 14 in the Senate’s Democratic caucus who has NOT endorsed Clinton, herself a former senator. And, as Madeleine Albright told us last week, “there’s a special place in Hell” for women who don’t support each other.
Eric Fehrnstrom, a Republican strategist and former adviser to Governor Mitt Romney thinks he knows why Warren has chosen the slow road to Hell. Writing in today’s Boston Globe, Fehrnstrom says, “Sanders is the inheritor of the same progressive forces that swept Warren to victory in 2012.” In other words, Sanders and Warren are ideologically simpatico.
Moreover, Fehrnstrom writes:
Clinton’s relationship with Wall Street is too cozy, especially as the beneficiary of outsized speaking fees from the big banks Warren has spent her entire career battling.
To put Clinton’s tin-cup rattling on Wall Street into perspective — and why progressives like Warren are aghast — it would be as if an anti-abortion candidate like Marco Rubio were giving paid speeches to Planned Parenthood affiliates.
As NBP’s Evan Lips reported earlier this year, in 2004, Warren, then a professor at Harvard Law School, told Bill Moyers of PBS News that Senator Clinton caved to Wall Street interests and supported an identical version of a bill that Warren had previously convinced her to oppose.
“As Senator Clinton, the pressures are very different,” Warren said. “It’s a well-financed industry. You know a lot of people don’t realize that the industry that gave the most money to Washington over the past few years was not the oil industry, not the pharmaceuticals — it was consumer credit products.”
Speaking of Clinton, Warren added, “she has taken money from the groups, and more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.”
Echoing this theme, Fehrnstrom notes:
For Warren to endorse Clinton in the primary, she’d have to repudiate not only the anti-Wall Street crusade that carried her into office, but also her own words.
Will Warren instead endorse Sanders?
Some pundits, including NBP Editor Jennifer C. Braceras, have speculated that Warren will remain silent in the hopes that Vice President Biden jumps into the race late and taps her as his running mate.
Last summer, Warren met privately with Biden at his official Naval Observatory residence in Washington. Although CNN reported that their conversation focused on economic policy, others speculated that presidential politics was the real reason for the meeting.
Biden later decided not to enter the race, but talk of a criminal investigation into allegations that Clinton improperly transmitted classified information over a private email server, and Sanders’ success at the polls thus far, has given rise to speculation that the party may draft Biden at the last minute.
Only time will tell whether Warren will play any role in Campaign 2016. For now, however, the cagey senior senator from Massachusetts is staying silent.