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The White House clearly wants Elizabeth Warren, and they're wrong to want her.
I have received a ton of emails about this tweet! Here is my followup to it:
Let's eliminate all but the top 3 on the D side as conceivable nominees. Of the 3, Biden is the most liked; Warren has the most sophisticated political and policy operation; and Sanders was right about things last time but he's shedding staff everywhere and looks like old news.
I believe in the context of the 2020 race that the case for normalcy is overrated as a general election appeal, in part because it comes in the person of Joe Biden, who does not project "normalcy" while being a gaffe machine coping with oncoming senility.
This is not to say he can't win, of course he can. But it is to say that Joe Biden a year from now, heading into the final debates, will likely be even shakier and exhausted from a year on the trail... and that is not good.
I see the central question for the electoral college as this: can you win back a sufficient number of white non-college voters, who were 44 percent of the electorate in 2016, voted for Sanders in the primary last time around and then voted for Trump in the general.
Biden's appeal to these voters would be emotional, not policy centric. Warren's appeal would be that she is the one candidate other than Sanders who can make an appeal that delivers on what people wanted.
"You demanded economic populism in 2016, Trump didn't deliver on it. I will. Your families will be better off. I will take it to fat cats and the bigs. I can drain the swamp he became a part of. And instead of kowtowing to Paul Ryan, I will redistribute from the wealthy to you.
"Wall Street's afraid of me because I can't be bought or bullied. And for all you Hillary voters who think I sound too radical, I'll remind you I can break the glass ceiling and even if I don't sound woke, you'll get plenty of wokeness from my policies, and you know it."
As I said on Face the Nation this morning: the top four candidates for president are all septuagenarians. She's the one with the energy to spend 4 hours on a rope line after a 90 minute speech.
There are obvious defects here. Warren would have to do some work among African Americans. But she also an opportunity to redo 2004, a Dean-Kerry showdown, with the weirdly energetic supposedly too-extreme progressive matched up against the supposedly-moderate electable old guy."
If you believe, as many do, that a recession is likely next year, whose message would play better in that moment, when bailouts will be discussed again in all likelihood and people will be worried about their pocketbooks: Warren's, or Biden's? I don't think that's close.
