Month: November 2013

The Tea Party that never ends

by digby

If you read nothing else today, please read this important piece by Rick Perlstein in The Nation:

A Democratic president begins a new term in the White House. Two years later, America votes a cadre of aggressive conservatives into Congress, loaded for bear. At first the Republican establishment, thrilled to have the Democrats on the run, puts its wariness about the fire-breathers aside. Within a few years, though, the new guys throw out all the old rules of consensus and compromise, and the establishment shows signs of buyer’s remorse. One of the new conservatives, a bulky, take-no-prisoners senator who sees socialist quislings everywhere, takes control of the agenda and threatens to drive the GOP into the ground.

But this is not 2008 or 2013. It’s the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the senator is not Ted Cruz but Joseph McCarthy.

A new sort of conservative has taken over the Republican Party from the ground up—and they don’t give a goddamn about anything the US Chamber of Commerce says. They want a total divorce between capitalism and the government, and whoever disagrees can go straight to hell. Business people, above all else pragmatists, are alarmed at the prospect of losing control of “the party of business” and hatch schemes to take it back. The Democratic president, for his part, declares a White House open-door policy for business leaders and makes maintaining a climate favorable to business a keynote of his administration. Suddenly, the direction of the Republican Party itself seems to be at stake.

But this is not 2013. It is 1964. The business-friendly president is Lyndon Johnson, and the Republican insurgents are followers of Barry Goldwater.

Moderate Republicans are on the run. The most powerful establishment Republican in Washington is by most measures a conservative. He argues in his speeches that the nation’s economic problems “bear a label: Made in Washington, DC.” He proclaims “a crossroads in our history”: whether America will continue on the path of “bigger government” and “higher taxes” or take a new direction to “halt the momentous growth of government.” But that’s not enough for the leader of the grassroots conservatives, who proclaims the establishment leader a sellout. But even more rabid conservatives distrust the conservative leader and call him a sellout as well. They hatch an insurgency against the insurgency.

But the establishment leader is not John Boehner. It is Gerald Ford. The conservative leader is not a Tea Partier but Ronald Reagan. And the insurgents—led by Jesse Helms, fresh from an effort to start a conservative third party—insist that Reagan’s campaign strategy isn’t conservative enough. So they effect a boarding party and attempt to turn the Republican platform into a full-on extrusion of right-wing ideological rage—“a reminder,” a columnist then opined, “that Helms belongs to that rabid band of committed conservatives who stop just short of conceding that they are willing to kill the party if they can’t control it.” Sound familiar?

Perlstein is the premiere historian of the modern conservative movement and he knows whereof he speaks. (And I’m old enough to have lived through a few of these alleged insurgencies myself.) And I have to say that one of the more astonishing aspects of liberalism is its starry-eyed confidence that the Republicans are always on the verge of being rejected by the mainstream because … well, how could they not be? They’re just terrible.

And yet, at least since Goldwater, the right wing has been relentlessly moving ahead sometimes incrementally and other times with grand victories. But the one thing that never happens is that they never, ever give up. It turns out they really believe what they believe. (And yes, there have been liberal advances as well, especially culturally — but the great “liberal consensus” the Democrats think is just around the corner, never seems to arrive.)

I’ve been writing about this for a long time, questioning the assumption that there is some moment of national kumbaaya just around the corner in which the conservatives will come to their senses and we’ll all live happily ever after. I guess it’s a natural inclination of both sides. But the liberals seem to be the one’s who always take their victory laps before the race is won and end up feeling disillusioned and looking particularly foolish in the process. (I’m thinking especially about the recent delirious celebration after the government shutdown ended in which their alleged annihilation of the right lasted no more than a week.)

This fight goes all the way back to the beginning and has been present in our culture and politics ever since. It’s never going away. Circumstances change its contours, one side may be ascendant while the other licks its wounds, but it’s always present. This battle defines us.

Please read the whole Perlstein piece. It’s not depressing, it’s realistic. And if liberals would understand that this is the way American politics are structured we might actually find that it’s possible to fashion long term strategies that don’t depend on dynamic leaders and instant success to sustain them.

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Now is not the time for trade deals

by digby

Sometimes gridlock is just what the doctor ordered:

Tea party Republicans insist they’re in favor of free trade. They just don’t want to place a key trade negotiating power in President Barack Obama’s hands.

The deep suspicion of giving the president authority to fast-track trade pacts through Congress without amendments — which Republicans have traditionally supported — is just the latest rift between the Big Business-aligned mainstream GOP and the party’s more populist tea party wing, which dislikes the legislative mechanisms that make trade deals work and is loath to hand Obama another victory.

They’re as incoherent as ever, but so what? As with some of the other items in the “bipartisan” big business goodie bag, they’re too dumb and obstinate to know they’re actually getting what they want. But that’s a good thing.

GOP Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Walter Jones of North Carolina released a letter signed by 22 House Republicans on Tuesday condemning fast-track authority as a measure that allows Obama to “unilaterally write legislation making the pacts’ terms U.S. federal law.” Rep. Darrell Issa of California, meanwhile, has complained about the Obama administration’s “secretive, closed-door negotiating process” on the deals that fast-track authority would prevent Congress from amending.

Outside Congress, tea party movement leaders are delivering a similar message. Judson Phillips, the head of Tea Party Nation, has railed against Obama’s trade agenda. So have Bruce Fein, an adviser to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the conservative advocacy group Eagle Forum.

If Obama has fast-track authority, “the House cedes to the president its constitutional power to write legislation that regulates commerce with foreign nations,” Schlafly said in a recent email to supporters. “We’ve never had a president who so arrogantly grabs and uses such unlawful power.”

They have had no such problems when the president was a Republican of course. But no matter. These trade deals are a bipartisan problem and it takes bipartisan obstruction to stop them:

The push to have Congress renew fast-track authority is always tricky. Liberal Democrats — the allies of labor unions — reliably oppose free-trade proposals. So does the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. That leaves moderate Democrats to band with more mainstream Republicans to move trade bills.

It’s an alliance that in the past has been just strong enough to squeak by. When fast-track trade authority was last approved, the House vote was 215-212. That was 2002 — long before the tea party’s rise. It would take less than a majority of House Republicans to gum up the process now. If just some Republicans link arms with liberal, pro-labor Democrats in opposition, that bloc of free-trade supporters could be shattered and fast-track authority doomed.

Considering the recent performance of the US economy and the ongoing, relentless pursuit of austerity it’s an especially bad time to be making any “trade deals.” God only knows what they’ll come up with. So let’s just table that little project for the time being, shall we? The Tea Party may be opposing it out of the most shallow, stupid reasons imaginable but if they want to be useful idiots for a good cause, that’s just fine.

Update: This excellent piece by Rick Perlstein on the premature exultation among liberals about the seemingly always imminent GOP crack-up, shows that whatever happens here is not the result of a schism between the economic “populist” right wing and the “Business” right wing. They are the same thing and always will be. Their reasons for opposing trade deals have little to do with the underlying policy and everything to do with their simple-minded hatred for Barack Obama. Like I said, useful idiots.

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You can’t fix the problem with asset-based policy

by David Atkins

Nouriel Roubini, one of the great economists who predicted the housing and financial crisis, has an excellent article highlighting the dilemma of central bankers worldwide: use tight money policies that slow growth and cause deflation, or or loose money policies that threaten to reinflate asset bubbles. Progressives naturally tend to favor loose money policies especially in a recessionary environment. Particularly when elected governments seem unable or unwilling to engage in stimulative spending, central banks are frequently the only entities capable of pseudo-Keynesian policy.

But the problem, of course, is that loose money from reserve banks isn’t remotely the same as stimulative spending. Most loose money policy goes straight into assets rather than wages. That’s better than nothing in a deflationary slow-growth economic environment, but it’s not remotely enough. Further, there is a great danger of reigniting another financial powder keg by creating more bubbles.

Some policymakers – like Janet Yellen, who is likely to be confirmed as the next Chair of the US Federal Reserve – argue that we should not worry too much. Central banks, they argue, now have two goals: restoring robust growth and low unemployment with low inflation, and maintaining financial stability without bubbles. Moreover, they have two instruments to achieve these goals: the policy interest rate, which will be kept low for long and raised only gradually to boost growth; and macro-prudential regulation and supervision of the financial system (macro-pru for short), which will be used to control credit and prevent bubbles.

But some critics, like Fed Governor Jeremy Stein, argue that macro-pru policies to control credit and leverage – such as limits on loan-to-value ratios for mortgages, bigger capital buffers for banks that extend risky loans, and tighter underwriting standards – may not work. Not only are they untested, but restricting leverage in some parts of the banking system would merely cause the liquidity from zero rates to flow to other parts of it, while trying to restrict leverage entirely would simply drive the liquidity into the less-regulated shadow banking system. According to Stein, only monetary policy (higher policy interest rates) “gets in all of the cracks” of the financial system and prevents asset bubbles.

The trouble is that if macro-pru does not work, the interest rate would have to serve two opposing goals: economic recovery and financial stability. If policymakers go slow on raising rates to encourage faster economic recovery, they risk causing the mother of all asset bubbles, eventually leading to a bust, another massive financial crisis, and a rapid slide into recession. But if they try to prick bubbles early on with higher interest rates, they will crash bond markets and kill the recovery, causing much economic and financial damage. So, unless macro-pru works as planned, policymakers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

For now, policymakers in countries with frothy credit, equity, and housing markets have avoided raising policy rates, given slow economic growth. But it is still too early to tell whether the macro-pru policies on which they are relying will ensure financial stability. If not, policymakers will eventually face an ugly tradeoff: kill the recovery to avoid risky bubbles, or go for growth at the risk of fueling the next financial crisis. For now, with asset prices continuing to rise, many economies may have had as much soup as they can stand.

Not only is loose money policy from central banks not enough, it’s actually quite dangerous in the long run without accompanying stimulative policy on the wage side. In the end, if housing prices are rising much faster than wages are growing, it’s unsustainable for obvious reasons. Everyone was making too much money in the aughts to pay it any attention, but policymakers are paying more attention now to the gap between wages and housing prices. Ideally, wages and housing prices would rise in tandem, with wages hopefully outstripping assets. Yes, that would cause mild inflation–but that’s not a bad thing as long as it’s kept relatively under control. During boom times, central banks can raise interest rates and tighten monetary policy counter-cyclically in order to strike a balance and keep inflation in check.

Until the world does something to reverse the growing income inequality and wage stagnation trends, central bankers won’t have any good options but to keep monetary policy loose and hope against hope that wages start to go up before the next bubbles pop. That’s not a great bet.

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Democrats can’t run from Obamacare.  They shouldn’t try.


by digby

So conservative Democrats are getting jittery and starting to contemplate jumping ship. Imagine my surprise:

This Friday, House Republicans are expected to vote on a proposal — championed by GOP Rep. Fred Upton — that would allow insurance companies the option of continuing all existing health plans for a year, in response to the loss of plans that has taken place despite Obama’s vow otherwise. The White House points out that this will undermine the law. 

Dem leadership aides have predicted that some House Dems will vote for the plan. And CNN’s Dana Bash stirred up chatter today when she Tweeted that “lots” of House Dems will vote for it if the White House has not put forth its own fix by the end of the week — in effect giving the White House a deadline. Obviously, “a lot” of Dems voting for this proposal would constitute another major Obamacare headache.

House Democratic leaders are privately warning rank and file Dems that a vote for this bill – and other anti-Obamacare legislation – could alienate leading Democratic donors heading into 2014, a source familiar with internal discussions tells me. “Votes against the Affordable Care Act are going to turn off a lot of these top national progressive donors,” the source said in characterizing the arguments.

Naturally Democratic Senators are falling all over themselves with similar “fix” legislation of their own.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to fix the problems with Obamacare, of course. I don’t think anyone ever thought it was going to be perfect (and oddly the rough roll-out could conceivably result in more cooperation with Republicans than we might have hoped.) So proposing real fixes to the system is a good and necessary thing.  But I think we know that’s not what’s happening.  In fact, all the fixes being currently proposed will actually make things worse.

Not that certain players won’t benefit from all this chaos:

One group that won’t benefit by campaigning against Obamacare are Democrats.  And that hold true whether they voted for it or not.

Take a look at this list:

John Adler (NJ), Jason Altmire (Blue Dog-PA), Mike Arcuri (Blue Dog-NY), John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA), Marion Berry (Blue Dog-AR), Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Rick Boucher (VA), Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL), Gene Chandler (Blue Dog-KY), Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS), Artur Davis (AL), Lincoln Davis (Blue Dog-TN), Chet Edwards (TX), Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (Blue Dog-SD), Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA), Larry Kissell (NC), Frank Kratovil (Blue Dog-MD), Lipinksi, Jr (IL), Stephen Lynch (MA), Jim Marshall (Blue Dog-GA), Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT), Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC), Michael McMahon (NY), Charlie Melancon (Blue Dog-LA), Walt Minnick (Blue Dog-ID), Glenn Nye (Blue Dog-VA), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR), Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC), Ike Skelton (MO), Zack Space (Blue Dog-OH), John Tanner (Blue Dog-TN), Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS), and Harry Teague (NM).

That’s a list of all the Democrats who voted against Obamacare in 2009.   Afterwards a number of them looked at the polls and decided they needed to spend more time with their families and “retired.” Their seats were won by Republicans. Davis and Melancon decided to run for higher office (and lost.) Altmire and Holden lost their jobs through Democratic primaries in 2012 — and voting against Obamacare was an issue in both campaigns. As for the rest, with the exception of Barrow, Lipinski, Matheson, McIntyre, and Peterson, every last one of the remaining Blue Dogs on that list lost his seat in 2010 to a Republican.  Voting against Obamacare didn’t help them one little bit.  And voting against it again by going along with more GOP sabotage won’t help any Democrats in 2014 either.

Democrats cannot run away from this. They shouldn’t even try. In fact, if they’re worried about keeping their seats they need to convince their constituents to hang in there and explain to them how the reforms will end up being a net plus for them in the long run. Every Democrat in the country has Obamacare wrapped around them very tightly whether they like it or not. So they’d better do everything in their power to make sure it works.

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Benghazi comedy and some keen insight

by digby

The Colbert Report and Daily Shows both had hilarious takes on the 60 Minutes debacle last night. Here’s Stephen:

The Colbert Report
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The Colbert Report
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Stewart takes on Huckleberry Graham’s refusal to change his view in light of the “correction”:

The Daily Show
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On a more serious note, this piece on the hoax and its meaning by Amy Davidson gets to the point I’ve recently come to understand is at the heart of this controversy: Lara Logan’s mediocre journalism (which is informed by her highly romantic, Manichean worldview):

It’s a sad aspect of this story that Logan claims the segment was more than a year in the making. Where did the time go? In the fairly long piece, Logan fails to offer any real statement about the Administration’s perspective. Only two other people are interviewed on camera. One is a military man who doesn’t understand why the diplomats didn’t get out of Benghazi months earlier. Another is a diplomat who doesn’t understand why, at the critical moment, significant military forces didn’t move into Benghazi from across the border. Davies, who is somehow supposed to tie these threads together, doesn’t understand why, on the first day he first arrived in the city, he found Libyan guards “inside, drinking tea, laughing and joking” rather than looking sharp, and why everyone didn’t heed a private contractor, like him. Not that Davies is identified as such: he’s a “security officer,” Logan says. “A former British soldier, he’s been helping to keep U.S. diplomats and military leaders safe for the last decade.” (Nor does she mention that his book, promoted in the segment, was published by Simon & Schuster, a unit of CBS, something she has admitted was a mistake.) But who knows what Davies said before or during the attack. His account is about as good as a spilled cup of tea, making the rest unreadable.

Those military and diplomatic questions deserve better answers, ones about policy choices rather than half-discerned conspiracies. You wouldn’t know from Logan’s report that the United States was engaged at the time in a historic and violent transition in Libya, in which the Qaddafi regime was overthrown with the help of our forces, or about that revolution’s disordered denouement, or about the Obama Administration’s decision to ignore the War Powers Act. Libya is presented as nothing but a place with a diplomatic mission and Al Qaeda’s black flags in the street. Brave men swinging rifle butts are thwarted by craven ones in Washington who won’t move their “military assets” into the country.

And as she points out, nobody’s bothering to tell the real story:

Benghazi the scandal is full of absurdities. Libya, the real country, is the scene of its own national tragedy, and an American one, the walls of which have barely been scaled.

Logan’s not interested in such panty-waist navel-gazing so unless that story can be told through stories of brave mercenaries saving Western Civilization from the forces of darkness, I wouldn’t count on 60 Minutes to do it. You’ll get a much more grounded understanding by watching Colbert and Stewart.

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A sports figure to love

by David Atkins

If you don’t follow professional basketball, you probably don’t know Gregg Popovich. Suffice it to say that Popovich is one of the NBA’s most successful coaches. His San Antonio Spurs have twice won the championship four times, came within a hair’s breadth of winning a third last year, and he has won the NBA’s award for most valuable coach.

Stylistically, his Spurs have become something of a stand-in for progressive values in basketball, if there is such a thing. The Spurs feature an international cast of players; their style is relentlessly selfless, with their passing and teamwork often defeating younger and more athletic teams; and their players are humble almost to a fault, displaying little of the obnoxious braggadocio so often associated with professional sports.

Popovich is also an Air Force vet. So it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to see Gregg Popovich ripping into the heartlessness of food stamp cuts on Veteran’s Day:

With Veteran’s Day coming up, Popovich – an Air Force Academy graduate and former basketball player who returned as an assistant coach there early in his career – took full advantage of a reporter’s question about the forthcoming holiday. And with the federal food stamp program having recently been cut in ways that made life a little tougher on approximately 5,000 troops, Popovich highlighted the sad irony that came with this less-than-ideal context.

“In a lot of ways, it’s a joyous day if we all remember to honor people,” Popovich began. “But in some ways, it’s a sad day because (soldiers and veterans) don’t really get honored the way they should be. Some of it is just pablum. When it comes down to the nuts and bolts of what they need, they’re really not getting everything.

“Just like the way it is right now – how many vets might have to do without food stamps because of what’s going on with the government right now? That program is huge to a lot of these families. I mean huge. It gets them through. And it may or may not be there – who knows? – because government is not very functional at this point, as we all know. So it’s a day to reflect, to honor but also to not lose sight of the fact that a whole lot more has to be done with what they’ve done for all of us.”

I was already a Spurs and Popovich fan before, but this just solidifies it. There is a battle for the heart and soul of the country, and it’s happening everywhere. Even on the basketball court.

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Bro Blogroll


by digby

It’s interesting that Ross Douthat only has one woman listed on his blogroll, don’t you think?

Alan Jacobs
Alex Massie
Andrew Sullivan
Damian Thompson
Daniel Larison
Dave Weigel
David Frum
Ezra Klein
First Thoughts
Front Porch Republic
George Packer
Get Religion
Greg Mankiw
Hot Air
Jeffrey Goldberg
Jim Geraghty
Keith Hennessey
Kevin Drum
Marc Ambinder
Mark Shea
Matthew Yglesias
Megan McArdle
Mickey Kaus
Ordinary Gentlemen
Postmodern Conservative
Reihan Salam
Rod Dreher
Secular Right
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The American Scene
The Corner
The House Next Door
The Next Right
The Plank
The Standard Blog
Tyler Cowen
Vulture
Will Wilkinson

Well, Hot Air is run by a woman so I guess that makes it two. I’m sure if you added up the penisless bloggers at the various group sites he mentions you’d come up to at least 17% which would be the same percentage as women in congress, so that’s not so bad. What’s really great, however,  is how much he writes about culture without feeling the need to consult with those who might represent certain interests of  50% of the population. What an amazing talent.

h/t to g

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From the grifter file: Look who’s back.

by digby

The last we heard of James O’Keefe he was in legal trouble. But he’s tanned, he’s rested and he’s going after Obamacare:

“This investigation shows just how vulnerable Obamacare is to fraud,” said James O’Keefe. “Taxpayers loose billions due to Medicare fraud and there is a clear possibility of billions more being wasted under a government-run health care system costing taxpayers $1.7 trillion.”

His followers are pleased:

Hitler understood the value of using welfare as a tool to rally support, so do most EU leaders today, and increasingly in S.E Asia lately too. This video shows that the Democrat industry understands it & uses it as an integral part of their ‘gowth’ strategy. The M.O: get people hooked on handouts, get them to resent the private sector, to be disenchfranchised and see the Govenrment as a paternal authority to go to for all aspects of everyday life. Well done for exposing this. Keep it up.

Does not surprise me. It’s just one more damn thing that will piss me off when writing a check to irs in april. My wife and I are idiots to work so hard for scum liberals like these to con us. I am thinking a life change is coming. I think we are going to work less and starve these bastards with less of our taxes. STARVE THESE BEASTS!

…as over 50,000 Californians relocated to Texas in the last 10 years. When the host is dead, the vermin relocate and will vote the same in the next host. Unless you stop them from relocating to Texas, you’ll be blue in less then 10 years.

h/t to Nicole Sandler for the press release, which has this at the bottom:

The Project Veritas is a 501(c)(3), founded by James O’Keefe. The mission of the Project Veritas is to investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.

He does have a sense of humor doesn’t he?

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You’ll take away my trans fats when you dig them out of my cold, clogged arteries


by digby

Rand is all up in arms over the jack-booted doughnut snatchers:

Sen. Rand Paul warned Americans that the federal government is targeting doughnuts, the latest example of the oppressive nanny state in America.

“They’re coming after your doughnuts!” the Kentucky Republican said, referring to the Food and Drug Administration decision to ban trans fats.

Paul added that if the FDA was banning trans fats, the employees of the agency should be forced to get healthy themselves.

“I say we should line every one of them up. I want to see how skinny or how fat the FDA agents are that are making the rules on this,” Paul said…

“Because if we’re going to have a nanny state and everybody’s got to eat the right thing, and you can’t eat a doughnut, maybe we just ought to enforce it on the government workers first,” he said.

Apparently he thinks you can’t make doughnuts without trans fats. I think that’s going to come as a surprise to Krispy Kreme. Or anyone who’s ever eaten real doughnuts made with real ingredients.

He’s all upset about the nanny state in this piece, but keep in mind who he sees as the truly aggrieved party: the major food industry manufacturers who want to keep poisoning people with cheap, chemical ingredients that are killing them. In fact, Paul would defend their right to put arsenic in the food supply on exactly the same basis that he defends the right to put trans fats in the doughnuts.

Libertarian economics can be summed up in one phrase: Caveat emptor, suckers


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If the liberal Democrats are unhappy, it’s all good

by digby

There’s a lot of chatter about this Noam Scheiber article discussing the notion of Elizabeth Warren running to Hillary Clinton’s left for the presidential nomination in 2016. I’d be very surprised if it happens, but if it does I think it would be great. But then I’m a big fan of primaries because they make candidates have to fight out the agenda their own voters want them to enact and that’s as it should be. Coronations are unAmerican.

I’ve been amused by the fact that Clinton is now so popular when once every remotely positive comment about her (or in defense of her) by a liberal had to be prefaced with “I’m no Hillary fan but …” Frankly, I think the reason so many Democrats are lining up behind Hillary is because of the lingering emotions of 2008. As Rebecca Traister so beautifully illustrated in her book,”Big Girls Don’t Cry”, that primary race was unusually ugly and I think a lot of people are still unnerved by what rose to the surface during those days. In fact, Chuck Todd just told me that the Democrats who were the most hostile to her in 2008, educated white men, are overwhelmingly for her this time. But hey, that’s completely predictable. Clinton was a good girl and didn’t complain and did as she was told and now the men in charge have decided that it’s ok for her to be elected. (That’s certainly how it usually works in the business world, anyway.)

Still, ideological liberals are going to be upset if she runs as an unreconstructed New Dem and it would be good for her and the party if she got some heat and had to run to the left. The Republicans are so screwed up that she’s probably a shoo-in (just as Obama was in 2008) and there is no reason she will have to be a centrist to be accepted. She’s got room to be progressive — if she wants to be. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that any member of the Democratic establishment is all that progressive. What’s the old song? Oh, that’s right: money changes everything.

Unfortunately, all this talk about a Warren run that is highly unlikely to happen means that liberals will probably be mad at Clinton for being too centrist and also mad at Elizabeth Warren for betraying them by not running. Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom amongst Democrats has long been that as long as liberals are feeling betrayed, everyone else will be happy.

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