Who's Afraid of Elizabeth Warren?

The only Democrat who appears fully equipped at this point to vanquish Donald Trump in a presidential election made it perfectly clear late last month that she fully intends to do so. (And she got out ahead of Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who all-but-announced his own bid in Iowa this past Saturday.)

For the last two years, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been steadily building toward this vital rescue mission, readying herself for the one election in all our lifetimes (let us hope) that will actually live up to the quadrennial “most important election in American history since 1860” hype. “Warren’s early moves position her as a clear front-runner,” Jonathan Chait wrote last month at New York, thanks to “a well-designed strategy to compete across the spectrum of the Democratic Party without risking her viability in a general election.”

But after Warren told a town-hall questioner that she was “taking a hard look” at converting that prep work into an official campaign as soon as the midterms are done and dusted next month, the response from her party was, by and large, “sure, fine, yawn, whatever.”

This was downright strange.

Maybe that happened because Warren dropped the news at the furious height of the Kavanaugh fight; maybe Warren’s big reveal was too casual, as opposed to Booker’s long-hyped speech in Iowa. And of course, it was hardly a shocker; you don’t plant your aides in key Democratic positions in early primary states, work hard to transform yourself from a sometimes-awkward public speaker into an electric presence on the stump — much less spend months rolling out FDR-worthy plans to democratize corporate America, clamp down on political corruption and reimagine affordable housing — because you plan to merely remain a senator.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/elizabeth-warren-2020-735194/