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Can Elizabeth Warren Beat Hillary Clinton in 2016? Is She Going to Try?

The Massachusetts Senator emerged from last week's budget fight as the leader of an undeniable populist uprising in the Democratic Party.
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Last week, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren loudly and vigorously opposed a bipartisan compromise to the Dodd-Frank bill that would eliminate restrictions on "swaps," a type of transaction Wall Street traders used to sell risky loans, and ultimately, drive the financial markets into a tailspin from which the global economy is only now recovering. Warren spent all of last week telling anyone who would listen that the compromise, included in the $1.1 trillion spending bill that Congress passed this weekend, was a terrible idea.

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"Who does Congress work for? Does it work for the millionaires, the billionaires, the giant companies with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers? Or does it work for all of us?" she asked in a speech on the Senate floor, blasting the provision as "the worst of government for the rich and powerful."

"People are frustrated with Congress," she continued. "Mostly it's because they see a Congress that works just fine for the big guys but won't lift a finger to help them. If big companies can deploy their armies of lawyers and lobbyists to get the Congress to vote for special deals that will benefit themselves, then we will simply confirm the view of the American people that the system is rigged."

The legislation may have passed, but Warren's relentless campaign against weakening Dodd-Frank is the latest piece of evidence that explains why the former law professor has become the darling of the progressive left. And thanks to stances like this—all part of her convincing anti-Wall Street, pro-consumer resume—a growing chorus of liberals are calling for Warren to be the party's next Barack Obama: a candidate who can get the people going, and defeat Hillary Clinton from the left.

Warren's rise began in the mid-2000s when, as a professor at Harvard Law School, she began to vocally oppose the growing income-inequality gap that would come to a head in the financial crisis. MoveOn.org, the progressive activist organization, first featured her in an email back in 2005, according to mailings forwarded to VICE by Ben Wikler, MoveOn's Washington director.

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In 2010, MoveOn featured her in another email, asking its members to sign a petition calling on Obama to name Warren as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency she had played a major role in creating. Convinced Warren could not overcome the virulent Republican objections to her appointment, Obama passed her over for the role, but she parlayed the momentum into a 2012 Senate campaign that made her one of the progressive movement's favorite members of Congress.

Since then, Warren has had to deal with the usual obstacles of being part of the most publicly despised body in the American political system. But that hasn't seemed to hamper her own reputation, in part because Warren has continued to pursue the priorities that drove her ascent in the first place. In addition to going to bat to protect Dodd-Frank, Warren has also been at the forefront of resistance to Obama's recent nominee for treasury undersecretary, a 48-year-old banker named Antonio Weiss who is currently global head of investment banking at Lazard. It's always rare for Democrats to oppose nominations from their party's president, but Warren's opposition is particularly notable because she's galvanized a progressive uprising to push back against Obama's nomination.

All of this activism has crystallized into a strong movement to persuade Warren to run for president—an opportunity that, so far, she's expressed little interest in. The progressive organization Democracy for America, which has in the past partnered with politicians like Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders, sent out a mailer this week affirming their support for Warren against Wall Street and Lazard. DFA's executive director Charles Chamberlain told me that they've long been in Warren's corner, supporting her efforts to lead the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, as well as her Senate campaign in 2012.

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"I hope what candidates for Congress and president, up and down the ballot, have learned from this week is that Wall Street Democrats don't have the support of the grassroots base," Chamberlain said. "The reality is that Wall Street helped get us into the mess we're in, and it's time that we have candidates who really stand up to the people and are fighting for what the middle class needs. Ultimately, that's why we see this growing movement for Warren to run for president. We unequivocally understand that she's been sent to Washington to work for the people, not Wall Street."

That confidence in Warren's convictions—and her fealty to her party's progressive base—seems to be the driving force behind the growing push to get her to run for president. Chamberlain said that even if Warren isn't a presidential candidate in 2016, whoever does run will have to acknowledge that Warren Populism is the future of the party, and that Democrats who did succeed in the 2014 midterms succeeded on the platform of fighting income inequality.

One of the biggest campaigns to get Warren to bid for the presidency is MoveOn's Run Warren Run petition drive. According to Wikler, the petition grew out of the overwhelming desire among MoveOn members for the Democrats' 2016 primary to be a contested election, rather than a coronation of Hillary Clinton, and for Warren to be the one leading the fight against the party's heir apparent.

"What we've seen since she entered the national stage is that Senator Warren speaks with such conviction and clarity about the central political issue of our time, which is an economic system that's rigged by special interests against regular people," Wikler said. "We just see that fight as absolutely central to 2016, and it's the fight of Warren's life."

The groundswell for Warren feels reminiscent of Obama's own candidacy, and it's starting to take on literal parallels: 300 former Obama staffers just signed a petition asking Warren to run. And Wikler thinks she shares the president's wide-ranging appeal, suggesting that her populism might appeal in red states as well as blue ones.

If Warren does run—and again, there's no sign that she's actually going to—her campaign would face the same task that Obama's did in 2008: convince the Democratic party that it's better off throwing its support behind a one-term senator with a gift for rhetoric and a message of reform than it is going with Clinton, the one of the most famous politicians in the country. And in contrast with the more centrist Clinton, Warren's liberalism is as aggressive as it comes. She'll have plenty of hurdles to clear in any campaign, not the least of which is a Wall Street bear that she misses no effort to poke.

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