Run, Warren, run! The woman liberals prefer over Hillary

The announcement by Jeb Bush – brother of one US president, ‘Dubya’, and first son of another, George H.W. – that he is “actively exploring” a run for the White House in 2016 brings America closer to another ‘Bush v Clinton’ election battle and the long-anticipated clash of political dynasties.

But is this the moment for Democrats in America to forget about Hillary Clinton – who has yet to declare anyway - and go for a very different candidate for the historic opportunity to be the first woman president of the United States?

Elizabeth Warren, the Senator from Massachusetts still in her first term of office, has just set Washington alight and thrilled the “base” of the Democrat party to a degree Hillary has never achieved.

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Last Friday was witness to a shameful political roll-over in Washington of the type that remains incomprehensible to outsiders, and makes us wonder just what “representative democracy” really means in the Republic: President Obama and his fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill allowed Wall Street banks to kick into touch the banking regulations that followed the Great Recession, in exchange for Republican assent to the annual bill which funds the government, avoiding another shut-down.

Both Democrats and Republicans allowed the rider to the Appropriations Bill, with 80 per cent of the wording taken directly from e-mails from lobbyists for Citigroup, to dismantle the Dodd-Frank regulation banning banks from gambling customers’ money on high-risk derivatives, the cause of the disaster of 2008, and from getting taxpayers’ money to bail them out the next time their greed bankrupts the world economy.

• First reaction: Can Jeb Bush extend the dynasty?

One voice ignored the party whips and private pleas from Obama himself for all on the Hill to bow down and kiss the bankers’ bottoms: that of Senator Warren.

“Enough is enough with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position and the kind of cronyism that we have seen in the executive branch,” she argued on the Senate floor. “Enough is enough with Citigroup passing 11th hour deregulatory provisions that nobody takes ownership over but everybody will come to regret. Enough is enough.

“Washington already works really well for the billionaires and the big corporations and the lawyers and the lobbyists.

“But what about the families who lost their homes or their jobs or their retirement savings the last time Citigroup bet big on derivatives and lost? What about the families who are living paycheck to paycheck and saw their tax dollars go to bail out Citi just six years ago?

“We were sent here to fight for those families. It is time, it is past time, for Washington to start working for them!”

Warren failed to deny Wall Street its prize. But she may have caught the zeitgeist and changed the game.

“The Speech That Could Make Elizabeth Warren the Next President of the United States,” announced the Huffington Post.

“Elizabeth Warren represents a new politics,” wrote Miles Mogulescu, “in which, by challenging the power of the oligarchy, she has the potential of reclaiming the white working class for Democrats and uniting them with the coalition of professionals, single women, gays and minorities who elected Obama.

“She is the first major national politician in decades who is willing to openly challenge the power of the Wall Street oligarchy, in the manner of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who declared, ‘They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred’.”

The Washington Post reported that Warren’s performance lit the fuse to “draft Warren” campaigns that have been simmering for months. The most powerful comes from the MoveOn.org, launched during Obama’s own insurgent 2008 campaign and taking credit for securing him the key votes of the young. It will not be lost on the Clinton camp that MoveOn did much to derail her last bid for the White House.

The Daily Beast, long a devotee of Hillary, suggested that “it’s time Hillary started getting worried”.

“Are future historians going to look back on the past weekend as the one in which Elizabeth Warren took over the Democratic Party?” asked Michael Tomasky. “She didn’t win the fight she led over the weekend to have the provision weakening the Dodd-Frank law stripped out of the spending bill, but she was never going to win that vote.

“What she did win, though, was the ever more intense ardour of her growing number of liberal fans. They’d march with her over hot coals. There’s no other Democrat in the country with that kind of following.”

It is not the colour or gender of the next president which will count, but his or her willingness to tackle the crony capitalism, corruption of money and the income gap which yawns ever wider as a result, and which is increasingly recognised as the true danger to the character and security of America.

That’s a tough call. Obama was not up to it. Warren’s star is shining brightly because she has shown that being brought into the Senate, and into the Democrat leadership, has neither cowed her nor blunted her view that Wall Street and the oligarchy must be brought under control if the American middleclass is ever again to prosper.

The political wisdom is that Warren cannot win a presidential election because she is too far to the left, is too green, and has no foreign policy experience. If she were to gain the Democrat nomination, she would be painted as a “socialist” and so be defeated by almost any Republican - let alone a Bush, or even a Bush, depending on your point of view.

Warren has repeatedly denied that she plans to run. The inside view is that she can most usefully use her rising popularity to force Hillary and the Party to move towards her economic views, while leaving the White House to the sure bet.

Sure bet? Hillary has taken a no-risk posture to the point of invisibility as she sidles towards her “coronation”. She will have plenty of campaign money – much of it from, yes, Wall Street – and plenty of seasoned political savvy.

But what has Hillary to offer the young, the increasingly impoverished, the immigrants and the racial minorities who are so bitterly disappointed in Barack Obama?

Last week, 300 former people who worked on the victorious Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012 put their names to an open letter to Warren, posted on the Ready for Warren website, urging her to enter the race.

“We want someone who will stand up for working families and take on the Wall Street banks and special interests that took down our economy,” they wrote.

As the Washington Post reported, “She is the one they’ve been waiting for.”