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​Correct The Record Thursday October 30, 2014 Morning Roundup:

Headlines:

Politico Magazine: “How to Back Hillary Into a Corner”

"Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the vast right-wing conspiracy: The question of how to actually defeat her is proving to be a surprisingly difficult one to answer. Republican activists haven’t come up with a coherent line of attack..."

Politico: “Clinton rallies Dems in Iowa”

“Hillary Clinton returned to Iowa on Wednesday to fire up the Democratic base, blasting big money’s influence in politics while also hearkening back to her own experiences in the critical presidential state.”

The Hill: “Hillary talks up women's issues in Iowa”

“The former secretary of State’s roughly 23-minute stem-winder touched on a range of populist priorities, from protecting Social Security and Medicare to raising the minimum wage and keeping college affordable. But her remarks about women’s health and reproductive rights received the loudest and longest applause.”

MSNBC: “Hillary Clinton slams Republican in Iowa Senate race”

“Hillary Clinton came to Iowa ready to fight.”

Bloomberg: “Clinton Tries to Rebuild Damaged Iowa Brand”

“The Clinton appearance, which will be followed on Saturday with one by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, illustrates the determination of both parties to use every weapon, every surrogate, every dollar they can spare to drag their candidate over the finish line in a race that could determine control of the Senate.”

Associated Press: “Jeb Bush swipes at Hillary Clinton in Colorado”

“In a possible preview of a 2016 presidential race, former Florida governor Jeb Bush took a swipe at Hillary Clinton on Wednesday evening as he stumped for Republican candidates in the vital swing state of Colorado.”

Politico: “Elizabeth Warren: Not running, still vexing Hillary Clinton”

“Elizabeth Warren almost certainly is not running for president. She’s also not going to make Hillary Clinton’s life simple.”

Esquire: “The Democrats’ Hillary Clinton Problem”

“What if I can beat her? That's the question Martin O'Malley is searching the country for an answer to, even if he declines to admit that's what he's doing.”

Central Florida Future: “President Bill Clinton to host election rally at UCF”

“Former President Bill Clinton will join Charlie Crist at UCF for an election eve rally on Nov. 3. The event will begin at 7:30 p.m. and will be held at Memory Mall.”

Mediaite: “Ralph Nader on Hillary: ‘She’s a Menace to the United States of America’”

“Hillary Clinton, first off, is far too big a ‘corporatist and a militarist’ to lead the country. Nader said, ‘She thinks Obama is too weak, he doesn’t kill enough people overseas. So she’s a menace to the United States of America.’”

The New Yorker: “Elizabeth Warren Wins the Midterms”

“Indeed, as Clinton makes her way around the country, campaigning for embattled Democrats, she is sounding more and more like Warren.”

Articles:

Politico Magazine: “How to Back Hillary Into a Corner”

By Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush

November/December 2014

[Subtitle:] A report from the secret race to answer 2016’s most pressing question.

One afternoon in late September, David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s former campaign manager and most trusted political aide, slipped into Hillary Clinton’s stately red-brick home on Whitehaven Street in Washington, D.C., to lay out his vision for her 2016 presidential campaign. The Clintons have always made a habit of courting their most talented tormenters, so it wasn’t surprising that she would call on the man who masterminded her 2008 defeat as she finds herself besieged by Republicans replaying Plouffe’s greatest hits.

Over the next couple of hours, Plouffe told Clinton and two of her closest advisers—longtime aide Cheryl Mills and John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and now Obama’s White House counselor—what she needed to do to avoid another surprise upset. His advice, according to two people with knowledge of the session, looked a lot like Obama’s winning strategy in 2012: First, prioritize the use of real-time analytics, integrating data into every facet of her operation in a way Clinton’s clumsy, old-school campaign had failed to do in 2008. Second, clearly define a rationale for her candidacy that goes beyond the mere facts of her celebrity and presumed electability, rooting her campaign in a larger Democratic mission of economic equality. Third, settle on one, and only one, core messaging strategy and stick with it, to avoid the tactical, news cycle-driven approach that Plouffe had exploited so skillfully against her in the 2008 primaries.

In Plouffe’s view, articulated in the intervening years, Clinton had been too defensive, too reactive, too aware of her own weaknesses, too undisciplined in 2008. His team would goad her into making mistakes, knowing that run-of-the-mill campaign attacks (like Obama’s claim she merely had “tea,” not serious conversation, with world leaders as first lady) would get under her skin and spur a self-destructive overreaction (Clinton responded to the tea quip by falsely portraying a 1990s goodwill trip to Bosnia with the comedian Sinbad as a dangerous wartime mission). She was too easily flustered.

Plouffe’s last and most pressing point was about timing. A couple of weeks earlier, Clinton had told an audience in Mexico City, “I am going to be making a decision ... probably after the first of the year, about whether I’m going to run again or not.” The comment alarmed top Democrats: The Republican attack machine was already revving up, running anti-Hillary focus groups to figure out her vulnerabilities, dispatching opposition researchers to Arkansas, churning out anti-Hillary books and creating Fox News-fodder talking points to cast her State Department tenure as a failure and her campaign-to-be as a third-term extension of Obama’s increasingly unpopular presidency.

Now Plouffe, with the politesse of a man accustomed to padding around a president,  implored her to start assembling a campaign as soon as possible and to dispense with the coy fiction that she’s not running in 2016. “Why not?” he asked. “They are already going after you.”

***

Clinton didn’t need to be told she’s under attack. She is, after all, the woman who coined the term “war room” and sees campaigns as exercises in personal, not just political, destruction. Over the years, Clinton has told friends that presidential elections aren’t won or lost by attacking an opponent’s weaknesses. “They beat you by going after your strengths,” she is fond of saying, according to one longtime aide, alluding to the Swift Boat-style assaults perfected by Republican strategist Karl Rove.

What’s striking today, however, is just how formidable those strengths appear to be heading into the 2016 presidential contest, a campaign that Hillary Clinton will start—and, yes, secret strategy sessions such as the one with Plouffe indicate she is virtually certain to run—as an unusually prohibitive favorite, especially in comparison with potential GOP contenders. “She’s not perfect,” joked one of Obama’s longtime advisers, “but something beats nothing, and they’ve got nothing.”

Six years ago, it was her own party that tripped up Clinton, but this time the vast majority of Democrats (about two-thirds of them favored Clinton in fall polls, with Vice President Joe Biden a distant second) see Clinton as a suitable standard-bearer, even as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has become the darling of the party’s progressive wing. Warren has said she won’t run against Clinton, and the likelihood that Clinton will face any serious competition in the primaries, much less an Obama-like juggernaut, remains remote. She has access to the best talent her party can muster (in addition to Plouffe, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, and his analytics and field gurus, Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird, have already committed to helping Clinton). She will raise vast sums with ease, and Clinton insiders say she seems determined to play directly to perhaps her biggest political asset this time: her historic appeal as the first woman with a real shot at the White House.

As strong as Clinton appears to be, Republicans today are as weak and divided as they were on the eve of the disastrous 2012 primary season, with the party torn between the competing imperatives of assuaging its hard-right Tea Party wing and searching out a nominee who will have the best general-election shot against Clinton. The field is going to be crowded, young, credible and contentious, with Senators Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as likely contestants, and Chris Christie, Paul Ryan or even Jeb Bush as maybes. Inevitably, a standard-bearer will emerge, but 79 percent of Republican voters couldn’t identify a candidate they were enthusiastic about, according to a CBS/New York Times poll taken in September.

Which is where Clinton comes in: There’s nothing like a common enemy to bring a fractious party together, and she is precisely the kind of divisive figure who unites Republicans. How to beat her has become perhaps the most pressing question in American politics today, and what we found in interviews with two dozen operatives from both parties—including several Clinton insiders—is that the shadow campaign to find Clinton’s weaknesses and exploit them is already the defining aspect of the 2016 presidential race.

The 2008 opposition research handbooks against her have become sought-after reading among Washington’s political operatives—we obtained copies that suggest why—and the number of organizations devoting serious time and resources to new anti-Hillary initiatives is growing by the day: There’s America Rising, a super PAC engaged in researching and focus-grouping Clinton’s vulnerabilities; the Washington Free Beacon, a scoop factory launched by a conservative advocacy group, and dedicated to unearthing new scandal; the Republican National Committee’s research shop, which has collected material on the Clintons for decades; Citizens United, the group whose Supreme Court case ushered in the era of unregulated campaign spending and is producing an anti-Hillary documentary set to pop in 2016; the Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity, whose August meeting in Dallas turned into a Clinton-bashing party; and the small, noisy and aptly named Stop Hillary PAC, whose founder describes his mission as reminding the world that “Hillary the Brand is bullshit.” They are compiling dossiers, dispatching trackers to Clinton events and collaborating with like-minded Republicans on Capitol Hill; at the same time, every organization aligned with a potential GOP 2016 candidate routinely includes Clinton questions in its polling, the better to define its candidate as the only Republican capable of keeping her out of the White House.

All of which suggests the extent to which the 2016 campaign is, in the absence of other storylines, all about Hillary. Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the vast right-wing conspiracy: The question of how to actually defeat her is proving to be a surprisingly difficult one to answer. Republican activists haven’t come up with a coherent line of attack that will exploit Clinton’s vulnerabilities, a unified field theory of why she can’t be allowed in the Oval Office. “Everybody’s looking for a silver bullet, but in the absence of that we’re finding a lot of lead,” is how Michael Goldfarb, a GOP strategist who runs the Washington Free Beacon, described the dilemma of the booming anti-Clinton industry.

Our interviews yielded almost as many lines of potential attack as conversations: There’s her age (she’ll turn 69 just before election day 2016), her health, her loyalty to a diminished Obama, Benghazi, Bill, the vast sums collected by the family’s charitable foundation, the Islamic State and the mess in the Middle East, Obamacare/Hillarycare, unanswered questions about old Arkansas and White House scandals, her perceived habit of stretching the truth, her enormous personal wealth—and how she got it.

Framing an effective anti-Hillary campaign is, in many ways, as complex a challenge as Clinton faces in establishing a rationale for her candidacy. For starters, the sheer volume of information on Clinton serves as a kind of political vaccine (of limited effectiveness, to be sure) against future attacks. So much is already known about Clinton, or presumed to be known, that even genuinely new revelations—like adoring, 1970s-vintage Clinton letters to Saul Alinsky, the leftist father of modern community organizing—or an audiotape unearthed by the Free Beacon of mid-1970s Clinton chuckling about the guilt of a rape suspect she defended—haven’t had a major impact, at least not yet. (“I had him take a polygraph, which he passed—which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” she says on the tape, laughing.)

It’s easy to dismiss, as many Democrats do, these early probing attacks as old news. But the drip-drip of rumor and punditry is turning into a steadier flow of potentially damaging revelations. And GOP operatives tell us they are rooting around for silver bullets in all the expected places, from the Benghazi killings to her lucrative speaking engagements and the family’s complex financial dealings. (The Republicans we interviewed said they weren’t looking into Bill Clinton’s personal behavior, but several Democrats we spoke with expressed fear that any new revelation about the former president whose sexual dalliance with a White House intern led to his impeachment would, in the words of one operative who played a prominent role on Clinton’s 2008 campaign, “disrupt everything.”)

But the far less sexy effort to construct durable anti-Clinton narratives almost certainly will pose a greater threat to her ambitions. “The silver-bullet strategy is totally a unicorn,” says Mary Matalin, a veteran Republican strategist who worked for Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and Dick Cheney. Instead, she argues, Republicans need to focus on “HRC’s many vulnerabilities,” which Matalin cheerfully lists: “First, the ‘soggy fries’ phenomenon—she’s been under the heat lamp too long … Obama fatigue … her own record [and] Obama’s foreign policy … her lame campaigning, and I say that lovingly, because being a bad candidate doesn’t make you a loser, just a losing candidate.”

Tim Miller, executive director of America Rising, a GOP-allied super PAC that has increasingly trained its sights on Clinton, told us the oppo wars are all about finding the killer facts that will actually work to sway voters against Clinton. That might be new information, or old information framed in new ways. “Everyone feels like they know her, so we have to give them information they hadn’t heard about to break through,” he says. “For younger voters, some of that ‘new information’ could be ’90s scandals and other aspects of their record they didn’t know about, making that material relevant, if not central, to the case against her.”

Clinton was insulated from these attacks when she jetted around the globe as Obama’s secretary of state, but in the past 18 months, as she has traveled the country and hawked a memoir that was clearly intended to positively define her post-2008 narrative, talking openly about running and stumping for candidates, her stratospheric popularity, which approached 70 percent at Foggy Bottom in 2009, has slumped. A Wall Street Journal poll in early September found that Clinton’s overall approval rating had sunk to 43 percent, with 41 percent disapproving, putting her back to roughly the same level as when she started her last presidential campaign, in early 2007.

That might be related to Obama’s own slumping poll numbers. In fact, the attack against Clinton that has emerged the earliest is just that: her obvious ties to the president and her tortured attempts to create daylight between herself and her former boss. “There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. She will continue foursquare … and put forward Barack Obama’s policy in a third and fourth term,” is how Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a 2012 also-ran positioning herself as the Anti-Hillary, put it to Politico in early October.

Democrats, especially those who watched her lurch from crisis to crisis in the 2008 race, worry that it’s not the attacks but her tendency to diverge from her own message and strategic imperatives that could prove her undoing—one of the points Plouffe gently delivered during last month’s meeting in the Georgian serenity of Whitehaven.

“You can get in her head,” a former Obama staffer who worked on opposition research against Clinton in 2008 told us.

It’s like psy-ops, one Republican Clinton specialist says: “She’s so easily rattled and taken off her game.”

***

In mid-2007, two teams of opposition researchers converged on Hillary Clinton from opposite partisan directions and wound up meeting on a strikingly similar anti-Clinton talking point.

“SEN. CLINTON CAN’T BE TRUSTED,” read the title on the first page of a 66-page opposition research manual churned out in early 2007 by a small team housed in the white-façaded Capitol Hill headquarters of the Republican National Committee.

The document—a reference book for the GOP’s surrogates and primary candidates—is a scattershot collection of nasty clips, derogatory book excerpts and unflattering statistics that painted a devastating, if disputable, portrait of a flim-flam woman, with references to Clinton’s role in the Whitewater scandal, the secrecy of her White House health reform efforts and her souring on the Iraq War and post-Sept. 11 harsh interrogation techniques. Reading it now, the document at first seems dated, a poison-filled time capsule (the first section: “Sen. Clinton’s Broken Promise on Jobs for Upstate New York”). But it’s revealing too, a preface to the book being written now and a concise demonstration of how a well-fed political organization can weave seemingly disparate facts into a coherent narrative. This is the stuff of modern political campaigns, and not just those with a Clinton on the ballot.

The oppo book still captures unflattering attributes of Clinton as a politician that neither time nor 956,733 air miles as America’s top diplomat have completely banished. In mid-2007, the RNC’s focus groups were saying the same thing that public polls were revealing about the presumed Democratic frontrunner: Clinton’s personal approval rating was stuck in the mid-40s, a killing zone for a presidential campaign, because voters simply didn’t trust her, and viewed her as someone who would say or do anything to get elected.

Obama’s opposition research team got off to a slower start than the RNC’s; it was short on cash and understaffed and most of its early efforts were aimed at assessing Obama’s own vulnerabilities. But it eventually reached similar conclusions about Clinton, though tailored for liberal, overwhelmingly anti-war voters in the Democratic primaries. Obama’s opposition research book focused—often in microscopic detail—on Clinton’s Iraq reversal. Oppo books from other Democratic candidates, including trial lawyer turned liberal activist John Edwards, hit on the same vulnerabilities, former staffers tell us. A pollster for one second-tier 2008 Clinton opponent pointed to two glaring negatives: She represented “the politics of the past,” the pollster told us, and she was seen, even among core Democrats, as being “hyperpartisan.”

(As if to prove that point, Clinton’s own war room pushed out, off the record, a steady stream of clips and rumors about Obama’s less savory associations, from indicted Chicago developer Tony Rezko, to the onetime radical Bill Ayers, to the firebrand Rev. Jeremiah Wright of “goddamn America” infamy.)

Obama’s aides peddled their share of oppo, too, but succeeded where the others failed because they were able to focus the vague misgivings about Clinton on a single point—Iraq, which was the dominant issue for primary voters—enabling doubts about Clinton’s judgment, trustworthiness and character to flow from her initial support for the war and later reversals. For Obama, who cultivated an above-politics image, it made for a superficially less negative-feeling campaign. He could attack Clinton on the issues while keeping his hands clean.

“You couldn’t trust her on Iraq, and that was really the entire ballgame, so we devoted all of our energies to tracking down every scrap of video and audio of her talking about Iraq,” recalled a member of the Obama ’08 brain trust who interacted with the research team. “Whitewater and all that crap didn’t matter; it was old news. We didn’t even bother to send anybody down to Arkansas until much later. It was all about Iraq. And we focused-grouped the hell out of that, and that’s what led in part to the ‘change’ meme, which was really kind of an anti-Hillary theme when you think about it.”

It all coalesced into a single devastating paragraph Obama delivered with brutal force at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, in November 2007. Hillary Clinton, he told the party activists that night, was too cautious, too calculating, too caught up in the politics of the past. Even today, two full campaign cycles later, that broadside is a kind of Rosetta Stone for anyone crafting an anti-Clinton message. “The same old Washington textbook campaigns just won’t do,” Obama said, as Clinton staffers stood in the wings, stunned. “That’s why not answering questions ’cause we are afraid our answers won’t be popular just won’t do. That’s why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do. Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we’re worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us just won’t do. If we are really serious about winning this election, Democrats, we can’t live in fear of losing it.”

Clinton probably should have seen the hit coming. But as many former staffers have told us over the years, her team was too distracted by the flurry of different jabs, coming from a multitude of attackers, to see the knockout punch. After the speech, her aides couldn’t settle on a response and became bogged down in press-release language rather than recognizing the existential threat posed by Obama’s argument.

One former Clinton aide, who remembers the confusion of the 2008 campaign, said Clinton faces a similar dilemma now: She is inclined to tout her experience, rather than articulate a vision of the future. Her tendency is not “to make this about leadership,” said the adviser. “Which is where the question of what the hell are her ideas comes in.”

***

In Hard Choices, her exhaustively comprehensive and well-nigh news-less memoir out earlier this year, Clinton cast her 2008 loss and four years at the State Department as redemptive and transformational experiences that made her less cautious, secretive and defensive. “I no longer cared so much about what critics said about me,” she wrote. “I learned to take criticism seriously but not personally. … I was brimming with ideas.”

The transformation may be real, but Republicans are betting that it isn’t.

One GOP operative leading an opposition research team told us the basic difference between 2008 and 2016 will be the “issue matrix”—not Clinton’s basic character as a candidate: “The attributes that have dogged her in campaigns past remain the same—she’s overly partisan, self-interested, not trustworthy.” Republicans, he added, need to force her to defend her record at the State Department and ask tough questions about her aggressive pursuit of six-figure speaking fees.

Hence the digging: Over the past 18 months, Clinton has raked in more than $5 million in speaking fees at universities and before business groups, according to an accounting this fall by Mother Jones. Conservative groups are hoping to mine gold from the chat sessions, too. America Rising, for example, has filed Freedom of Information requests to discover the details of Clinton’s speaking fees and appearances at 14 universities. It’s a rich and recurring source of negative Clinton headlines: Her deals often include private jets and luxury accommodations. In mid-October, Clinton was paid $225,000 to address an audience at the University of Nevada Las Vegas—where she, awkwardly, bemoaned the high cost of college tuition. Miller’s group also monitors nearly every public event she attends, 100 alone in 2014.

Many of the Republican groups and would-be candidates are also aggressively message-testing to see which post-2008 Clinton actions connect with the pre-2008 attack narratives that tripped her up before. The hyperpartisan rap flagged by Democrats in 2008 seems, at this early date, to have particular resonance. Recent focus groups on Clinton conducted for America Rising by Burning Glass Consulting, a Washington-based Republican firm founded by three female veterans of presidential and gubernatorial campaigns, found that the most damaging argument against Clinton—especially among women—was that she was “more politically motivated” than the average politician.

She’s Too Political seems the blandest and most benign of the bunch—after all, what driven, ambitious seeker of the presidency isn’t political? But it’s an especially dangerous one for Clinton and closely related to the venerable Don’t Trust Hillary meme: 2008 primary voters didn’t trust her, polls showed at the time, because they thought everything she did was politically motivated, especially her shifting positions on Iraq. In other words, one of her greatest tactical assets—her awareness of how everything she says or does fits into a larger political context—is also one of her greatest strategic liabilities, the core of her contention that enemies will attack her strengths.

The too-political theme worked especially well when combined with elements of the Republican attack that are sure to be laid out in extensive detail once the public campaign begins in earnest, and, not surprisingly, the Burning Glass focus groups showed support for Clinton among Republican, independent and even conservative-leaning Democratic women ebbing once the stuff of the expected negative ads was trotted out. The contentions (all dismissed by Clinton’s camp) that Clinton “ignored security warnings ahead of Benghazi,” that her family has benefited from “special deals” from allies and friends and her claim that her family was “dead broke” upon leaving the White House in 2001 all made voters “significantly less likely to support” Clinton in 2016, according to a Republican operative who shared the results with us.

Just as interesting was what didn’t move the respondents: Her age or the possibility that someone will uncover new revelations about her husband’s sexual affairs.

***

But how long will that last? The drama of Bill and Hillary, of the nation’s first grandmother/frontrunner and our whole long national conversation around the Clintons, makes a Hillary Clinton campaign different from any other; it is, fundamentally, a family business. The personal and the political are inseparable. There’s no doubt, for example, that she is a doting mother of Chelsea and grandmother of baby Charlotte; but how will highlighting her genuine enthusiasm be viewed by voters? Who knows, but for now, people close to her tell us she is a lot more excited about picking out 2014 baby furniture than 2016 campaign staff.

That’s also why even her allies question whether she really has the capacity for detachment when the discussion turns personal, as it inevitably will.

Joel Benenson, the Obama pollster who helped sharpen his candidate’s 2008 attacks on Clinton in his focus groups, thinks any Republican attempt to attack Clinton’s family will backfire. “If Republicans try to go after Hillary Clinton with the same kind of personal attacks that they have used in the past, they will only reinforce the worst characteristics of their current image,” he argued to us.

In 2008, Obama’s campaign didn’t often traffic in deeply personal attacks, but his aides were more than happy to pass along derogatory stories about Clinton in real time—and encourage Clinton beat reporters to pounce on the candidate’s mistakes on the trail. In the end, it may well have been Obama’s Chicago-based rapid response team, not his research department, that proved to be the most effective weapon. “There was a ton of shit that she did along the way that we just seized on,” recalled one former Obama adviser. The objective, the aide said, wasn’t only to win the news cycle—it was a long-term effort to mess with Clinton’s head and force her hair-trigger team to waste its time on relatively insignificant hand-to-hand combat.

Republicans seem to have learned those lessons. In May, the New York Post reported that Karl Rove—master of the political mind game—had raised questions at a paid speaking gig about Hillary Clinton’s supposed brain injury in December 2012, when she fell ill with a virus and fainted.

Rove, clearly relishing the trouble he was stirring up, was quoted saying, “Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.” Rove’s basic facts were off (she was in the hospital for three days, not 30) and some conservatives publicly rebuked Rove, including Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol. Other GOP operatives thought it was counterproductive. (Tim Miller told us that one of his goals in the run-up to 2016 is to “minimize GOP-ers making off-key critiques that can be used as chum for the cable news hounds and garner sympathy for Hillary.”)

But plenty of Republicans privately cheered Rove for inserting the issue of Clinton’s age and health into the 2016 conversation, given that she would be the second-oldest American ever to serve as president if she went on to seek and win a second term. One of them told us that it increases pressure on Clinton to release detailed health reports during the campaign and praised Rove for playing the role of “a useful suicide bomber.”

Did the bomb go off? At least initially, Clinton kept her cool, smoothly recalling in an interview that another Republican, the much younger Paul Ryan, had his own history of sports-related concussions when the issue of her health came up.

But it was a revealing Round One: The attack worked in her absence, when she wasn’t  out there as a candidate to tell her own story. In 2016, Republicans, for all their resources and energy, well understand they will have a much harder time defining Clinton if she clearly defines herself—not merely as a celebrity, a target or a shatterer of glass ceilings but as someone with a forward-looking message for an electorate sour on Washington and scared about the country’s direction.

Can she do it? After months of anodyne sit-downs promoting her book, Clinton finally seems to be heeding some of Plouffe’s advice, using her appearances for candidates late in the 2014 midterms as a dry run for her own 2016 message, a mix of the new Democratic populism, feminism—and old-fashioned Republican-bashing.

“We have spent years now clawing our way back, out of the hole that was dug in 2008, but we have a lot more to do,” she said during an appearance on behalf of a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania in October, “if we want to release our full potential and make sure that American families finally feel the rewards of recovery. And that’s particularly true, in my opinion, for American women. Ask yourself, why do women still get paid less than men for the same work? Why, after American women have contributed so much to our economy over the decades, do we act as if it were 1955?”

Speaking of those left behind during the shaky Obama recovery, she added: “We believe everyone deserves not just a chance but a second chance and even a third chance,” a comment that sums up her own current circumstances pretty succinctly.

Politico: “Clinton rallies Dems in Iowa”

By Katie Glueck

October 29, 2014, 4:53 p.m. EDT

DAVENPORT, Iowa — Hillary Clinton returned to Iowa on Wednesday to fire up the Democratic base, blasting big money’s influence in politics while also hearkening back to her own experiences in the critical presidential state.

The swing through Iowa is Clinton’s second visit since 2008, when she lost the first-in-the-nation caucus state to then-Sen. Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary.

Clinton, who appeared at rallies in Cedar Rapids and later Davenport, is likely to run again for the presidency in 2016, but has spent much of the past several weeks campaigning across the country on behalf of Democrats running this midterm cycle. Iowa is home to one of the closest Senate races in the nation, pitting Republican Joni Ernst against Democrat Bruce Braley.

“There is a flood of unaccountable outside money trying to muddy the waters here in Iowa and drown out your voice,” Clinton said at the first stop, a comment she offered in some form at both campaign visits. “So let’s cut through all the back-and-forth and focus on what’s really important: for any candidate, for any job, it’s not who you are that matters, it’s who you are for.”

Clinton, who said she knows personally that Iowans demand thoughtful answers from their candidates, went after Ernst for declining to meet with several of Iowa’s newspaper editorial boards.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said in Davenport. “Don’t answer the questions, don’t show up at the newspapers for the editorial board meetings, just let all that outside money that’s frankly trying to buy this election answer for you. Now I’ll tell you, that is not anything anybody should put up with … People who run for office are asking you not just for your support, they’re asking you for your trust. And if they won’t answer your questions or the questions of the newspapers of your state, how do you even know what they’re going to do?”

But, she added, people can get away with ducking questions when they are “far in the future.” The cheering crowd interpreted that as a nod to 2016.

Clinton, who herself has long had a tumultuous relationship with the press, said earlier in Cedar Rapids that “It truly seems it should be disqualifying, in Iowa of all states, to refuse to answer questions.”

Ernst spokeswoman Gretchen Hamel responded, “Joni’s priority is to meet with as many undecided voters as she can during her 99-county tour, but she is also meeting with several editorial boards.”

Between Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Clinton and Braley visited the Hamburg Inn in Iowa City, a favorite diner for politicians including former President Bill Clinton, whose photo was on the wall. There, Hillary Clinton ordered a chocolate bourbon pecan pie shake after soliciting recommendations from employees, and mingled with lunch-goers, telling them about her husband’s previous visits to the joint and talking about her new granddaughter, according to attendees. The owner of the Hamburg Inn, David Panther, was a precinct captain for Clinton in 2008 and told her he was ready for her to run again. She thanked him, he said, but didn’t reveal much about her plans.

On the 2014 campaign trail, Clinton has not always kept her stump speeches focused entirely on the candidates, but in Iowa, her remarks were more contest-specific.

“I know you’re going to have to work really hard in the next six days to overcome those negative ads, the flood of money that’s really trying to put a whole different spin on Bruce’s opponent,” she said. “So that you won’t pay attention to what’s actually happening. You’ll be more concerned about pigs and chickens” — references to ads on behalf of Ernst — “than hard-working women and men and kids who want to go to college and an economy that’s going to work for everybody.”

Clinton blasted Ernst over issues ranging from reproductive rights to the outsourcing of jobs. The former secretary of state said it’s not enough to be an Iowan, a woman or someone who grew up in the middle class — a candidate has to be a fighter for those constituencies, she said, implying that Ernst is not. Clinton also said that the race comes down to one question: “Who’s on your side?”

Hamel responded, “The truth is that Joni is a woman and a mom, who has the support of other strong women including Condoleezza Rice [another former secretary of state]. Secretary Rice and Joni Ernst know what war is, and this is not a war on women.”

Vice President Joe Biden — another possible 2016 Democratic White House contender — campaigned with Braley on Monday, and former President Bill Clinton is expected to make several campaign appearances in Iowa on Saturday.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts whom some liberals wish would run for president, received rave reviews recently when she delivered a fiery populist speech on Braley’s behalf.

In both Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Clinton ticked through a list of liberal priorities, including raising the minimum wage and defending access to birth control. But she was nuanced in talking about economic issues, keeping her focus largely trained on the middle class rather than employing the fiery populist rhetoric slamming big banks that she has brought out on several other recent campaign stops.

“Nobody expects something for nothing,” she said. “But nobody expects to have the ladder of opportunity pulled out from under people. Today Iowans are working harder than ever, but maintaining a middle class lifestyle can feel like pushing a boulder up a big hill every day. And a lot of people trying to get into the middle class just feel like they’re slipping further and further back.”

She also reiterated her opposition to tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas, following some recent parsing of her words on the issue.

Last week at a rally, Clinton said, “Don’t let anybody tell you that corporations and businesses create jobs,” but on Monday she and her team clarified that she misspoke, and that she had meant to refer to tax breaks for corporations, especially for those that outsource.

At the Cedar Rapids stop, Clinton was conversational, but in Davenport, she kicked up the energy and offered a more forceful delivery. As she worked the rope line after the event, Clinton posed for pictures and thanked attendees who told her it was time for a woman president, ignoring a reporter’s attempts to ask a question. She urged one rally-goer in Davenport, who was on crutches, to take up physical therapy.

“I’ve never forgotten how many Iowans opened up their hearts and their homes to me, here in Davenport and across the state,” Clinton said as she began her Davenport rally remarks, a reference to her last presidential bid. “That doesn’t surprise me because I can’t think of a place in America that takes politics more seriously.”

The Hill: “Hillary talks up women's issues in Iowa”

By Scott Wong

October 29, 2014, 7:16 p.m. EDT

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Mammograms. Birth control. Rape.

Hillary Clinton on Wednesday talked up women’s issues in a way that fellow Democrat Bruce Braley hasn’t been able to in his tough Senate race against Republican Joni Ernst.

“It’s not enough to be a woman. You have to be committed to expand rights and opportunities for all women,” Clinton told about 400 Democratic supporters she stumped for Braley at a union hall.

The former secretary of State’s roughly 23-minute stem-winder touched on a range of populist priorities, from protecting Social Security and Medicare to raising the minimum wage and keeping college affordable. But her remarks about women’s health and reproductive rights received the loudest and longest applause.

Clinton, who is largely expected to jump into the 2016 presidential race, never referred to Ernst by name. But she challenged the GOP state senator on sponsoring a so-called “personhood” amendment, which Democrats say would ban certain types of birth control, even in cases of rape and incest.

The former first lady also needled Ernst to answer whether she would deny women health insurance for contraception and force them to “just buy it over the counter.”

And she took the Republican to task for trying to repeal ObamaCare, a law Clinton said provides access to preventative services like mammograms.

“It was not so long ago that being a woman meant being labeled a pre-existing condition,” Clinton said, “and women were being charged more by insurance companies solely because of our gender.”

“You know where Bruce stands,” she added. “He doesn’t duck the tough questions.”

Iowa has never elected a woman to the U.S. House or Senate, or to its governor’s office. So Republicans are framing the race as a historic opportunity for the Hawkeye State.

Braley, a current congressman, is trailing Ernst by a few points, according to a new poll that came out Wednesday. For Democrats to hold the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Tom Harkin, Braley will need a big turnout at the polls from women, who typically favor Democrats.

Ernst spokeswoman Gretchen Hamel said her boss, a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard who served in Kuwait during the Iraq war, is no stranger to women’s issues and has the backing of another female secretary of state.

“The truth is that Joni is a woman and a mom, who has the support of other strong woman including Condoleezza Rice,” Hamel said in an email. “Secretary Rice and Joni Ernst know what war is, and this is not a war on women.”

More female reinforcements are arriving for Braley on Thursday: Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both Democrats from Washington state, will join Braley in Des Moines at a rally once again focused on women’s health issues.

Clinton’s message on women’s issues appeared to resonate with many in the crowd on Wednesday.

Jessica Emerson, 32, said Clinton’s remarks about abortion and contraception were poignant. She backed Clinton in 2008, and wanted her 6-year-old son to see her speak ahead of Clinton's expected 2016 run for White House.

“If Hillary runs in 2016, it’s something for him to remember,” Emerson said. “It’s a great experience.”

Peyton Bourgeois, 17, who attends Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids, said she wouldn’t be able to vote in Tuesday’s election. But she hopes to cast a ballot for Clinton in 2016.

“It was mostly to see Hillary Clinton in person. I’ve never seen her in person, only on TV,” said Bourgeois, a Braley volunteer who accompanied her grandmother to the rally. “I just like the fact that she’s a woman, and she’s into politics. I think that’s cool and inspires others.”

MSNBC: “Hillary Clinton slams Republican in Iowa Senate race”

By Alex Seitz-Wald

October 29, 2014, 5:50 p.m. EDT

Hillary Clinton came to Iowa ready to fight.

The former secretary of state delivered a withering attack on Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst here Wednesday, while campaigning for Democrat Bruce Braley in the key presidential state.

Sticking close to lines of assault Braley himself has employed, Clinton slammed Ernst for refusing to sit down with newspaper editorial boards that she views as hostile.

“It truly seems like it should be disqualifying in Iowa, of all states, to avoid answering questions,” Clinton said. Ernst, who skipped meetings with some of the state’s largest papers, currently holds a narrow lead in the polls ahead of next week’s election, but Democrats are hoping the editorial board flap and a superior get-out-the-vote effort will give them a last-minute boost.

Clinton, in the Hawkeye Sate for only her second visit since her presidential campaign ran aground here in 2008, was happy to help.

The once (and likely future) presidential candidate went after one of Ernst biggest strengths: her hardscrabble biography and “Iowa way” persona. “For any candidate, for any job, it’s not who you are that matters, it’s who you are for,” Clinton said.

“It’s not enough to be from Iowa, you have to be for Iowans,” Clinton continued. “It is not enough to have grown up in the middle class, you have to fight for the middle class.”

And then, pausing before the line that earned her by far the biggest applause: “It’s not enough to be a woman, you have to be committed to expand rights and opportunities for all women.”

The crowd of 400 loyal Democrats gathered at the union hall gave her sustained applause for nearly half a minute and whooped in agreement. Braley is beating Ernst among women by 8 percentage points, according to a new Quinnipiac Poll, but she leads by a larger margin among men.

But it was the editorial board meetings that Clinton kept coming back to. “[Iowans] test your candidates, you actually force them to be the best you can be. I understand that,” she added with a laugh, referring to her bid.

“Ask these candidates – or at least the one who will answer your questions,” Clinton continued. “You can’t let any of these candidates duck these questions. … Don’t let anybody hide behind outside money and negative ads.”

The Ernst campaign had its own rejoinder when asked for comment. “Congressman Braley’s surrogates often don’t even know his last name, so it’s no surprise Hillary Clinton’s facts are wrong,” Ernst spokesperson Gretchen Hamel told msnbc. “Joni’s priority is to meet with as many undecided voters as she can during her 99 county tour, but she is also meeting with several editorial boards.”

Clinton and Iowa have a complicated relationship. After coming in third in the state’s first-in-the nation caucus in 2008, the former secretary of state left and never looked back, steering clear of the Hawkeye state for six years. But ahead of a likely presidential run in 2016, Clinton returned in September to headline the Steak Fry, an annual fundraiser for the Iowa Democratic Party hosted by retiring Sen. Tom Harkin.

On her second visit, in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday, she took some time to recall “fond memories” of her time campaigning in the state. She mentioned spending the Fourth of July in the city and meeting with Teamsters here.

“So many people in Cedar Rapids and the county, and the surrounding area, opened up their hearts and their homes to me, and for that, I will always be really grateful,” she said.

Ernst was never expected to be much of a threat to Braley in the race to replace Harkin. But the charismatic National Guard commander has fired up Republicans and pulled ahead of Braley, who is weighed down by ties to Washington and what even Democrats privately admit is an unnaturalness at retail politics.

But the campaign remains confident about their chances. “Recent polling shows that the race is very tight, but all of the movement is in Bruce’s direction as we head into the final days,” Campaign Manager Sarah Benzing wrote in a memo sent to reporters. “Joni Ernst hit a ceiling a few weeks ago, and polls show that Iowans are moving in Bruce’s direction and there are strong reasons to believe that this movement will only continue.”

Clinton will host a second really for Braley on Wednesday evening, this time in Davenport, and her husband will visit the state Saturday.

Bloomberg: “Clinton Tries to Rebuild Damaged Iowa Brand”

By John McCormick

October 29, 2014, 6:39 p.m. EDT

[Subtitle:] In just her second visit to Iowa since her 2008 third-place finish, Clinton hit the stump for the Democratic Senate candidate.

Almost every Iowa poll for months has shown the U.S. Senate race as a dead heat, and that razor's edge environment was evident in the urgency of the messages from Hillary Clinton and Democrat Bruce Braley in their first joint campaign appearance.

"If you want a senator who doesn't believe Iowa is for sale to the highest bidder, please do everything you can for the next six days," the former secretary of state told about 400 people who gathered on Wednesday in a union hall in Cedar Rapids. "You don't want to wake up the day after the election and wish you had done more."

It was just Clinton's second visit to Iowa since her third-place finish in the state's 2008 caucuses, something she referenced in her remarks.  "I have concluded that Iowans take politics really serious," Clinton said. "You test your candidates. You actually force them to be the best they can be." Then, she paused for a moment and chuckled. "I understand that," she said. "They have to be willing to answer the tough questions, which Bruce has been willing to do and his opponent has not," Clinton said. "It truly seems like it should be disqualifying in Iowa of all states to avoid answering questions."

Clinton was referencing Republican candidate Joni Ernst's decision to skip editorial board meetings with some of the state's largest newspapers, including the Des Moines Register. "With Bruce Braley, you have somebody who has not only answered questions, endlessly, from one end of the state to the other, but has withstood a withering barrage of negative ads and innuendo and is still standing strong on your behalf," Clinton said.

The Clinton appearance, which will be followed on Saturday with one by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, illustrates the determination of both parties to use every weapon, every surrogate, every dollar they can spare to drag their candidate over the finish line in a race that could determine control of the Senate.

The former first lady criticized the "flood of unaccountable, outside money trying to muddy the waters here in Iowa to drown out your voices," and she tailored her remarks to appeal to women voters who are seen as being critical to Braley's political prospects.

"This race comes down to one question above all others: Who's on your side?" Clinton said, echoing a talking-point of the Braley campaign.  There are "big differences" between Braley and Ernst when it comes to reproductive rights for women, support for minimum wage and many other issues. "You never worried where Tom Harkin stood," she said in a nod to the Democrat retiring from the seat. "You will never worry where Bruce Braley stands. He's a fighter for Iowa."

Lisa Peloquin, a real estate referral agent from Cedar Rapids, was one of those who attended the Clinton-Braley event. She said she thinks of herself as an independent voter, but is a volunteer for Braley. "I would normally support a woman, finally, to represent the state of Iowa for national office," said Peloquin, noting how the state has never elected a woman to Congress. "But I cannot support this woman for office. I don't support her views. They are too extreme for me."

For Peloquin, Clinton is another story. After backing President Barack Obama in the 2008 and 2012 Iowa caucuses, she said she is open to Clinton. "In 2008, I thought her opponents would drag all of Bill Clinton's ghosts into the race," she said. "Now, Hillary has established herself as a former secretary of state and she stands on her own feet."

 Braley told those gathered that he needed them to throw themselves into get-out-the-vote efforts over the next few days. "What you do when you walk out of this union hall is going to determine the future of Iowa," he said.

Ernst and Braley are competing in one of the most closely watched Senate races this year. A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday shows Ernst at 49 percent and Braley at 45 percent, with just 5 percent of likely voters still undecided. The survey showed independent voters, the state's largest voting bloc, backing Ernst over Braley, 50 percent to 41 percent.

The Clintons and Braley have a bit of a checkered past. Back in 2007, when Hillary Clinton was running for president, Braley was a U.S. House member being courted by all camps for his endorsement ahead of the Iowa caucuses. After Clinton worked hard for it, he endorsed John Edwards. And, after the North Carolina senator's campaign imploded amid a sex scandal, Braley embraced the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. She and her husband are renowned for being both fiercely loyal and for holding political grudges, but if there was any awkwardness in Wednesday's appearance with Braley it wasn't obvious. Braley referenced a fundraiser Clinton headlined for him in 2006 and also presented her with a University of Iowa outfit for her new granddaughter, Charlotte.

Associated Press: “Jeb Bush swipes at Hillary Clinton in Colorado”

By Nicholas Riccardi

October 29, 2014, 10:25 p.m. EDT

CASTLE ROCK, Colo. (AP) — In a possible preview of a 2016 presidential race, former Florida governor Jeb Bush took a swipe at Hillary Clinton on Wednesday evening as he stumped for Republican candidates in the vital swing state of Colorado.

Bush was in Colorado one day after former President Bill Clinton departed the state and a little more than a week after Hillary Clinton was last there — an indication of both the intensity of the state's top race pitting Democratic Sen Mark Udall against his Republican challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner, as well as Colorado's oversized role in recent presidential elections. During a rally for the Republican ticket at a county fairground in this conservative Denver suburb, Bush, without mentioning her name, alluded to comments Hillary Clinton made while stumping for Democrats on Friday.

"This last week I saw something that was breathtaking, a candidate — a former secretary of state who was campaigning in Massachusetts — where she said that 'don't let them tell you that businesses create jobs.' "

Bush paused as the audience booed. "Well the problem in America today is that not enough jobs are being created, (but) they are created by business," Bush continued.

Clinton said the statement was a slip of the tongue, but Republicans eager to tarnish her image before a 2016 campaign have used it to mock her all week. Bush, a former Florida governor and a brother of former President George W. Bush, is one of many Republicans mulling a 2016 run. Another expected 2016 Republican contender, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, will campaign with Gardner and the GOP's gubernatorial candidate in Colorado, former Rep. Bob Beauprez, on Thursday.

Bush is fluent in Spanish and seen by many Republicans as his party's best candidate to reach out to the fast-growing Hispanic population, which is trending Democratic. Earlier Wednesday, he appeared with Gardner and Beauprez at Denver's Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, where he took questions from Spanish-language media about immigration.

The former Florida governor warned against President Barack Obama's expected executive action to limit deportations, promised for some time shortly after the election. Instead, Bush said Congress needs to pass a bill and that a newly Republican Congress would solve the nation's immigration woes — although the Republican-controlled House refused to vote on a major immigration bill this year.

"The constitution requires Congress to pass laws, not the president," Bush said in Spanish, contrasting that with some Latin American strongmen's ability to implement laws by fiat. If Obama acts unilaterally on immigration, Bush warned, "it will be harder to do it the appropriate way."

Politico: “Elizabeth Warren: Not running, still vexing Hillary Clinton”

By Maggie Haberman

October 29, 2014, 6:26 p.m. EDT

Elizabeth Warren almost certainly is not running for president. She’s also not going to make Hillary Clinton’s life simple.

But she provides an instant tutorial in the anger within the Democratic base, and an early warning signal to Clinton to avoid allowing the same openings against her candidacy that bedeviled her with Barack Obama in 2008.

Even without running, Warren has made clear she’s not interested in seeing a Clinton coronation. In Boston, when the two spoke at a rally Friday for Martha Coakley, the Democrat running for governor, Warren barely mentioned the former secretary of state in her remarks. In the past, the Massachusetts Democrat has criticized Clinton as too close to Wall Street.

The side-by-side appearance was a reminder that Clinton is still learning the language of the new economic populism, which formed in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis during a period when she was focused on foreign affairs. Her remarks — including a misdelivered line about businesses not creating jobs — added another scrap to the narrative pile that she is a reactive campaigner, who will bend if it’s politically expedient.

Warren’s speeches, in contrast, are untempered and raw. They hit a visceral chord with people living in the post-recession period, who’ve heard repeatedly that the economy is improving but don’t feel it in their own lives and who believe the game was rigged and other people benefited. That sentiment exists with both parties’ bases, but Warren has become the avatar for it among Democrats.

Clinton allies are quick to point out that the woman who was synonymous with the government-led “Hillarycare” effort has a claim on economic populism. She gave a speech discussing the anger people feel in the current economy earlier this year. Her speeches for other candidates this fall have hit the core issues of the new Democratic populism, and she has woven in a message similar to her husband’s from 1992 about raising the middle class.

But she is not yet a candidate delivering her own pitch, and she has shown she is still figuring out the notes to strike.

Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who symbolized the populist left in 2004 when he ran for president, but who has said he’ll back Clinton, said he thinks it is good for the potential 2016 candidate to have Warren help keep “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party in the game.”

He acknowledged Clinton has “to work on the language talking about income inequality.” But he added that he believes she will ultimately be fine, saying any candidate who wants to occupy the center of the political spectrum has trouble with the language of the left.

Clinton’s decision to stick with paid speeches since leaving the State Department and well into the second half of 2014 — she still has some coming up — has fed ammunition to her critics who paint her as too close to Wall Street and private corporations.

In Boston, Warren delivered a speech in which she used the phrase “big banks” repeatedly, describing Coakley as an underdog champion for working people. Clinton stood in the wings as Warren spoke, and when it was her turn, she lavished praise on the senator — and tried emulating her populist appeal.

“Don’t let anybody tell you that its corporations and businesses that create jobs. You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried, that has failed,” Clinton said. “It has failed rather spectacularly. One of the things my husband says when people ask him what he brought to Washington, he says, ‘I brought arithmetic.’”

After the comment ricocheted around the Internet for three days, Clinton eventually addressed it, saying she’d “shorthanded” what she had meant to say.

Zephyr Teachout, who challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo from the left in a September Democratic primary, denouncing him as a product of special interests, said “there’s an extraordinary opening” for a populist Democrat in 2016.

“Just looking at [Clinton’s] past, she can’t start saying populist words and feel like they resonate with people’s experiences with power,” Teachout said. “She continues to show she’s missing where the country is. … the modern American experience right now is one of a real sense that economic and political power are getting concentrated, and people [are getting] left out.”

Clinton first began addressing income inequality in a May speech at the New America Foundation, run by her State Department aide Anne-Marie Slaughter.

“The dream of upward mobility that made this country a model for the world feels further and further out of reach,” Clinton said, adding that “many Americans understandably feel frustrated, even angry.”

“Americans are working harder, contributing more than ever to their companies’ bottom lines and to our country’s total economic output, and yet, many are still barely getting by, barely holding on,” she said.

In an interview with Charlie Rose over the summer, in which she promoted her book, she said she would run a clear campaign that would “tackle growth, which is the handmaiden of inequality.” At the time, some Democrats privately noted that their 2014 candidates had discovered the phrase “income inequality” has little meaning on its own to voters.

She has since incorporated specific issues — equal pay, raising the minimum wage, blasting trickle-down economics. But the contrast with Warren last Friday is one that will play out repeatedly.

“This notion that you have to be in the presidential race to impact it isn’t borne out by reality,” Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who has consistently said he doesn’t believe Warren will run, wrote in an editorial on his website in July. “When Warren speaks, people listen. And if we have her back, sign her petitions, and make it known that she speaks for us on many issues, then Hillary will have no choice but to adapt. … Elizabeth Warren will not run. And that makes her more powerful and influential than she ever would [be] as an electoral also-ran.”

People close to Warren aren’t certain she intended to open the door a crack toward running for president in a recent interview with People Magazine, even though her language was noticeably less definitive about skipping a campaign. But they are certain she wants to define the terms of the debate within the Democratic Party, much the way the man she succeeded, Ted Kennedy, did from the Senate.

Warren could spend the bulk of 2015 declining to endorse Clinton, while giving speeches about the economy or introducing legislation in the Senate that presidential candidates will be pressed to comment on. She is almost certain to continue highlighting areas that are worrisome for Clinton.

And Clinton’s camp is watching Warren carefully.

For Clinton, the risk in moving her language closer to Warren’s is not so much that she’ll offend her donor base — most of her Wall Street supporters have said for months, even after the “corporations and businesses” comment, that they expected her to have to bend toward the base of her party. That certainly beats a Warren nomination in their view.

The greater worry for Clinton is holding onto and turning out her base of working-class moderates, who bolstered her in places like Pennsylania and Ohio during the 2008 primaries. On the other hand, it’s not clear that Warren, who was branded a liberal elite in her successful 2012 Senate race in Massachusetts against a candidate with blue-collar appeal, would fare well with Clinton’s base.

And in Iowa on Wednesday, where she campaigned for Senate hopeful Bruce Braley, Clinton had a new line that hewed to the “I’m-on-your-side” message Democrats want to see: “For any candidate, for any job, it is not who you are that matters, it is who you are for.”

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a longtime Clinton backer who was with her when she gave a populist-themed speech to boost gubernatorial hopeful Tom Wolf in Philadelphia this month, said her challenge is no different than any potential White House contender.

“I think it’s problematic for every candidate,” Rendell said. “I think every candidate, Republican or Democratic, has to at least master the language [of the populist base].”

“She has to get the semantics a little bit,” he said of Clinton. But he noted that six years ago, Clinton called for initiatives like closing the carried-interest loophole and universal health care. “By the end of the ’08 campaign, she was the most populist candidate in the race, by far.”

Warren’s own rhetoric aside, Rendell insisted Warren does not want to run.

“Nor is she in a position to, and I think she understands that,” Rendell said. He pointed out that the argument against Obama had been that he was too inexperienced — a first-term senator and university professor — and predicted the country will demand someone more tested in 2016.

“That’s Elizabeth Warren?” he said, chuckling. She “would get consistently 10 to 14 percent [in the primaries].”

Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, another unabashed Clinton fan from a swing state, also dismissed the idea of Warren as a threat.

“I don’t think she’s a challenge to Hillary Clinton,” Strickland said. “I don’t know how anybody could really be a challenge to Hillary at this point.”

Like Rendell, Strickland stressed, “I love Elizabeth Warren.”

But “I think it’s important also to have someone who is most likely to be successful in getting action and getting things accomplished,” Strickland added, “rather than being an inspirational figure who charges up the troops.”

Esquire: “The Democrats’ Hillary Clinton Problem”

By Charles P. Pierce

October 30, 2014

[Subtitle:] To elect a president, we probably ought to have some candidates. Candidates, after all, are choices. So where the hell are our choices? An argument against coronations, cleared fields, and conventional wisdom.

It is still the polo-shirt-and-blue-jeans-stage in what eventually will become the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States. It is still polo shirts and blue jeans and state fairs, and that's why Martin O'Malley, the governor of Maryland, and the former mayor of Baltimore, and perhaps the second-most-obvious Democratic candidate for president in 2016, has been working a hall at the Maryland State Fair like a friendly young county agent come to look over the crops. O'Malley has the green polo shirt with an official state logo and the blue jeans, and he's expressing great interest in what has been produced by Maryland's livestock—the shaved lamb at the buffet gets great reviews—and what has been grown in Maryland's fields. Across the wide midway, the carnival rides grind on, music and lights and the delighted screams of people who come here just for the fun of it.

Truth be told, by the standards of the great state fairs of the Midwest, Maryland's state fair is decidedly minor league. It is positively put in the shade when compared with the one they hold every year in Iowa and especially with the one they hold every four years in Iowa, in which an ungainly circus is laid atop the state fair and the locals get a good look at serious American politicians and their attempt to maintain their dignity while eating a corn dog. A year from now, if all indications are correct, the Iowa State Fair is going to be very important to Martin O'Malley, and it is very likely he will be wearing a nice suit as he confronts the corn dog of his destiny. This is what happens when you run for president. And Martin O'Malley is running, even if he says he isn't, even if he can still chill in a polo shirt and blue jeans because the power-suit portion of the campaign is still down the road.

"I'm helping everyone I possibly can in these midterms, and I'm finding that people all around the country are hungry for a conversation about where our country's going and how we get there," he says, "and how we start getting things done again as a people. As I campaign for Democratic governors across the country and have a chance to talk to people, I think they see that's the sort of effective leadership that's happening in many of their cities and many of their counties, even as the federal government appears to be having a more difficult time getting the hitch out of its get-along."

So O'Malley goes around the country, campaigning for people who are running in 2014 and therefore campaigning for himself in 2016, because the presidential campaign in this country never ends anymore. It just changes cast members, like Law & Order, a few at a time. And the one thing that Martin O'Malley doesn't talk about is the fact that there is one undeclared candidate on the Democratic side who is reckoned to be capable of taking the oxygen from the room, the money from the campaign, and the nomination for the asking.

She has "cleared the field." That's what the smart people say. Without even announcing that she will run for president, Hillary Clinton has frozen the Democratic primary process. She has frozen the media's attention and the energies of the party's activists, and, most important of all, she has frozen the wallets of all the big donors, all of whom are waiting for her to jump to decide what they will be doing over the next two years. It is hard to say she's been unusually coy. After leaving her job as secretary of state, Clinton went on a massive book tour, and she's been a fixture on the high-end lecture circuit, her fees for which suddenly became a campaign issue, even though there isn't a campaign yet. And most significantly, she and her people have begun to distance themselves a bit from the president she once served. She arguably was critical of Barack Obama's "Don't do stupid shit" policy. And when the ISIS threat arose in the Middle East, there were a few strategically placed comments from anonymous "Clinton aides" that were critical of the president for not moving fast enough to meet that new threat. By the standards of the fall of 2014, by the same standards that we judge Martin O'Malley by, Hillary Clinton is clearly running for president. And they say she has cleared the field.

They say she has cleared the field because that's what political pros get paid to say, but they also say it as a kind of supplication to the gods of political chance, because there is one thing that people in the party try very hard not to talk about these days, something that remains unspoken for the same reason that theater people do not say Macbeth and baseball players never mention a no-hitter in progress.

What if she doesn't run?

What if, for one reason or another, she can't run?

What happens if, after spending a couple years clearing the field, Hillary Clinton walks away from it all, leaving the Democratic party with nothing more than, well, an empty field? And Martin O'Malley.

"The phenomenon of clearing the field?" he asks. "That sounds like a horse-race question, and I'm not doing horse-race questions." And outside the hall, on the other side of the wide midway, the carnival grinds on anyway, music and lights and happy laughter, already in full swing for the day.

This is what "clearing the field" looks like. This is the conventional wisdom that, in our politics today and at this point in a presidential-election cycle, is always far more conventional than it is wise. Hillary Clinton has pride of place unlike any candidate in recent memory: She's the wife of a two-term president, a former senator from New York, and the former secretary of state. She has first call on the party's most talented campaign staffers, both nationally and in the states. She has first call on the party's most overstuffed wallets and on every local- and national-television camera from Iowa to New Hampshire and back again. This has been recognized tacitly by almost every other proposed potential candidate. Vice-president Joseph Biden is curiously (and uncharacteristically) reticent. Liberal darling Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts repeatedly has declined to run and signed a letter endorsing Clinton. Everybody else—ambitious senators like New York's Kirsten Gillibrand and ambitious governors like the dark lord, Andrew Cuomo, also of New York—is sitting back and waiting and silently asking themselves that question, running it through their own silent hubris until it produces an answer.

Question: What if she doesn't run?

Answer: Why not me?

It is not cowardice if it can be sold as shrewd calculation. And it can be sold as shrewd calculation, because that is the way wisdom becomes conventional, and the more conventional it becomes, the less wise it is. After all, in the spring of 1991, President George H. W. Bush, the conqueror of the Levant, had an approval rating of 80 by-God percent. This scared away most of whom were perceived to be on the Democratic party's A-list, including Andrew Cuomo's father, from challenging him. The elder Bush had cleared both fields, they said. One of the few people who stepped up was the governor of Arkansas, who put together a renegade staff that outhustled the Republicans for two years and got the governor of Arkansas, and his sharp lawyer of a wife, elected president. Some people look at a cleared field and see a place where there is limitless room to run.

(And we should pause here for a moment and mention the other side. According to the conventional wisdom, the Republicans do not have a cleared field. Rather, they have a "deep bench." There are governors who were elected in the great wave of 2010, and there are senators from that same era. Unfortunately, at the moment, the conventional wisdom already has been rendered far more conventional than wise. Of those governors, Rick Perry of Texas is under indictment, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin are under investigation, and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is underwater in the polls in his home state. Of those senators, Marco Rubio of Florida has rendered himself maladroit in his attempt to satisfy all the elements of the Republican base, turning his back on his signature issue—immigration reform—because it is unpopular with a large portion of said base. By the end of last summer, Republicans were talking openly of reanimating the career of Jeb Bush, he of the cursed surname. Mitt Romney was leading some polls in Iowa by a huge margin. If the Democratic field is clear, then the Republican field is thick with locusts.)

Which brings us to the conventional contrarianism that, in our politics today and at this point in a presidential-election cycle, is more conventional than it is contrary. The speculation goes this way: Clinton had the same advantages in 2008 that she has today, with the exception of her subsequently having been secretary of state. She had first call on staff, on contributors, and on the spotlight. And she spent two years getting beaten to the punch and utterly wrong-footed by the renegade staff of a junior senator from Illinois that had a better handle on the prevailing zeitgeist and a far superior knowledge of the new communication technology and how best to put it to political use, and that got the senator from Illinois elected president. To make an easy historical parallel, Hillary Clinton in 2007 was William Seward in 1859, a senator from New York whose pockets were bulging with IOU's and who was a power in the party and its presumptive presidential nominee. Seward led the race all the way through two ballots at the 1860 Republican convention until he and his people got outmaneuvered by a judge named David Davis and the people working on behalf of a politician from Illinois whose speeches had galvanized the nation but whose political résumé was painfully limited to one term in Congress. Ultimately, of course, and to close the historical circle, the politician from Illinois became president and Seward served as his secretary of state.

Thus is another unspoken question added to the list:

What if she doesn't run?

What if she can't run?

What if I can beat her?

That's the question Martin O'Malley is searching the country for an answer to, even if he declines to admit that's what he's doing.

"I guess that's a question that others can answer and, ultimately, the people will answer," he says. "For my part, I believe that in Baltimore city and in the state of Maryland, we have brought forward a new and better way of governing. It's not the old way of ideology and bureaucracy and hierarchy. It's about governing for results. It's about intentional leadership that's collaborative, that's open, that's transparent, that operates by way of common platforms of action. And that's where the country's headed. It's certainly the way the country's headed. It's certainly the sort of leadership that younger people are demanding, and the sooner we get there, I think, the better for our economy and the better for all aspects of our journey as a people."

He is positioning himself here as a candidate who can run against the notion of the cleared field, who can make the very concept of the cleared field an offense against democracy—a truncation of the people's right to determine their own leaders and to make their own independent choice. It is not so much that O'Malley is an "outsider"; he's been a mayor, a governor, and a national figure among Democrats for more than a decade. Rather, it is that he is challenging placid inevitability on behalf of democratic uproar. There is possibility in that. There always has been. Because Americans, damn them, love their horse race, even if Martin O'Malley would rather not talk about it.

At the beginning, of course, none of them wanted political parties. John Adams hated them, and so did James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. So, of course, as soon as the Constitution was up and running, the first thing they all did was form political parties and start laying clubs on one another. Adams's party faded when the country decided it didn't want every president to be either a Boston lawyer or a Virginia gentleman. The one founded by Jefferson and Madison remains with us to this day. The governor of Maryland is a member of it. So is the former secretary of state. So is the incumbent president of the United States, a fact that likely would have caused both of the party's founders to have a conniption.

The history of presidential elections is the history of rebellion against the idea of the cleared field, which, in the early days, meant empowering the rough frontier against the organized power of the Eastern elites and which, as the country grew, repeatedly demanded political inclusion for the citizens of an expanding nation. Madison and Jefferson, slave-holding plantation owners both, took up the cause of the small farmer against the powdered-wig set of high Federalists. Partisans of Andrew Jackson raged so fiercely against the "corrupt bargain" struck between Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams in 1824—in which Clay threw his votes to Adams in the House of Representatives, the body deciding the election, and subsequently was appointed secretary of state—that those partisans rendered Adams's presidency a failed formality until the day, four years later, when they could install their hero in the White House. Clay cleared the field for Adams, and they both were victims of an outraged expanded democracy.

The political parties nonetheless largely were closed shops until the great Progressive movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which produced the direct election of U.S. senators and the direct primary system, regarded by Republican reformers like Robert La Follette of Wisconsin as critical to breaking up the unholy wedlock of big corporate money and all the institutions of government that had cleared the field for what had become a politico-economic puppet show. As Matthew Josephson writes in The President Makers, his brilliant study of the period: "The clamor for 'more direct democracy,' often heard from the West, the demands for stronger control of the railroads and trusts, for the curbing of the speculation in grains, for tariff reform (in the interest of the agriculturalists), for direct primaries … the cry for all that would equalize the political unbalance now rose stronger than ever, a crescendo of protest."

In 1911, when he founded the National Progressive Republican League, La Follette made direct primaries one of that organization's founding principles. There always has been a kind of instinctive underground resistance to the idea of the cleared field, a kind of autonomic reflex in a democratic republic that pushes back against an idea that's seen as being an affront to what the country fashions itself in its own mind to be, an occasional inchoate desire to break through what Josephson calls "the old superstitious limits of the parties." If we must have political parties in a democracy, history tells us, then they must constantly be made to move toward being more democratic, election by election.

That reflex still exists today, and it is surely there for Martin O'Malley, or someone else, to tap into. It was there in 2004, too, when George W. Bush, a war president by his own devising, was standing for reelection and everything hadn't gone sour on him yet, and many prominent Democrats were a bit bumfuzzled about how to square their previous support for his wars with the rising sense in the country that at least one of those wars had been sold mendaciously and that they both were being bungled away through sheer incompetence. It looked for a moment like President Bush had cleared the field. Then a governor from Vermont started going to Iowa and talking about the bloody mess the president had created.

In 1917, they opened the Hotel Ottumwa, a grand little palace on Second Street where the elite of Ottumwa, Iowa, and all of surrounding Wapello County could meet to plot and plan and conduct their business. Despite what you might assume, the primary business of the town was not related only to farming; it also involved the production of coal, a rich vein having been discovered beneath the McCready bank of Bear Creek, which ran sluggishly not too far west of the city. With coal came manufacturing of all kinds. That was what the city fathers chewed over at Canteen Lunch in the Alley at midday and, after the hotel was remodeled in the 1930s, at the Tom-Tom Tap in the Hotel Ottumwa after work. By the 1970s, though, the city was in decline. Manufacturing had fled, as it had from many of the small cities of the Midwest. The hotel closed in 1973 and remained closed for almost ten years.

(Oddly enough, this occurred just as Ottumwa was becoming famous by proxy as the hometown of Radar O'Reilly, a character on the television version of M*A*S*H, which ran on CBS during the whole time the hotel was empty. Ottumwa's most famous actual military transient was a young Navy ensign named Richard Nixon, who spent part of World War II keeping a nearby airfield safe from the Japanese.)

New management reopened the hotel in 1982. It restored the guest rooms, the restaurant, and the Tom-Tom Tap, and it made the hotel a destination again. Which is why, in the fall of 2002, when George W. Bush was on top of the world and the smart money said he had cleared the field because of his performance after the 9/11 attacks, the only actual declared candidate for president of the United States in 2004 came to Ottumwa, shook hands in the Tom-Tom Tap, and then had a meeting in one of the function rooms with his local supporters. There were five of them.

"I think I jumped in because nobody knew who the hell I was," Howard Dean says today. "There were going to be candidates who were much better known than me. I couldn't afford to wait and they could, John Kerry being one of them."

His presidential campaign ultimately came to naught, but its energy propelled Dean into the role of chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2005, a post he was elected to despite the barely sub rosa opposition of establishmentarian figures like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Dean demonstrated a distaste for the notion that any seat in the Congress should be conceded without a fight. He devised a "fifty-state strategy" that, in 2006, as the country recoiled from the disasters brought upon it by the Bush administration, helped make Pelosi the first Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives since 1994. The Democrats took six Senate seats, including improbable renegade victories like Jon Tester's in Montana and James Webb's in Virginia. They took back a majority of the country's governorships and turned state legislatures upside down. If there is one thing that has marked Dean's entire political career, it is his belief that no field in any election should ever be cleared. It was why he was in Ottumwa in 2002. It was why he insisted that the Democrats compete everywhere in 2006, resulting in the cracking open of some pockets of support in traditionally Republican areas—a boon to the Democratic president elected in 2008. The Dean campaign, with its reliance on young tech-savvy people, also provided a useful template for the campaign that got that president elected.

"The only people I hear talking about 'clearing the field,' " Dean says, "are people inside the Beltway who know nothing. I mean they're very smart, but they don't know anything. I mean I think you're going to get a primary whether you like it or not. That's always the way it's going to be, because it's the most important office in the world, and when I hear that somebody's going to get an acclamatory ride, it's just not true.

"It's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just what's going to happen. I don't happen to think it's a bad thing to have a pre-election debate. I think it's unlikely to be a nasty one on our side. But the thing is, assuming Hillary runs—which I think is likely, but who knows?—I think she's going to be very measured about this. I think, in her own heart, she doesn't know for sure, but it looks a lot more likely now than it did last January, for example. But assuming she runs, I'm not in the 'Oh, a primary is good for us' or the 'Oh, a primary is bad for us' camp. I think the primary's a fact of life."

What Dean does not say is that primaries are also a kind of insurance against the stultification of the party's message and atrophy of its intellect, both of which can be worsened if the election actually is deemed to be over before it's even begun, before a single hand is shaken in the Tom-Tom Tap.

So what happens if she doesn't run?

That's the question nobody and everybody asks. She could decline for health reasons, or because she wants to spend a couple years giving speeches and being a grandmother, or because she doesn't want to go through the whole Cirque du Clinton again, this time as the main attraction in the center ring. There already have been indications that a political culture populated by politicians and journalists and formed by the pursuit of the presidential penis from 1992 to 2000 cannot help but return to its place of origin to spawn a new generation of nonsense. As early as last January, putative Republican contender Rand Paul went on a spree, summoning up the shade of Monica Lewinsky. Paul went for a combination shot: He called the Democrats hypocrites for arguing that the Republicans were waging a "war on women" after having defended Bill Clinton's "predatory behavior" while he was in office. (Paul also suggested that Democratic politicians should return all the money Bill Clinton has raised for them. Yeah, right.) Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus defended Paul's comments, telling NBC's Andrea Mitchell "everything's on the table."

"I don't see how someone just gets a pass on anything," Priebus said last February. "I mean especially in today's politics. So I think we're going to have a truckload of opposition research on Hillary Clinton, and some things may be old and some things might be new. But I think everything is at stake when you're talking about the leader of the free world and who we're going to give the keys to run the United States of America."

This was a not entirely camouflaged two-rail shot aimed not at former president Clinton but at potential president Clinton, a subliminal argument that she should have brained the cad with a frying pan but didn't because she always has been power-hungry. See how easy it was to transport back to 1992 again?

Given the very likely prospect of all that erupting again, perhaps even more garishly than before, owing to the accelerated technology of the media/entertainment/gossip industry over the past twenty years, what happens if she doesn't run?

"I think Andrew Cuomo might try. I think Kirsten Gillibrand would consider it," Dean says. "Amy Klobuchar will think about it. I'm sure O'Malley will be in. And I think Sanders will be in."

If you eliminate all the people who seem to be waiting for Hillary Clinton to make the call—Gillibrand first among them, because she has taken on national issues in a way that may lead you to wonder if she's not willing to make a run regardless—then there's O'Malley, piling up chits and IOU's all over the hinterlands. Maybe Jim Webb. And there's Bernie Sanders—and that may be the key to understanding the whole phenomenon of the cleared field. Sanders is an independent who caucuses with the Democratic side in the Senate. He is an unapologetic liberal, an actual Socialist at a time when the word is thrown around to mean anyone who believes in repairing roads and fighting fires. He also seems to be the one candidate, even more so than O'Malley, who has taken to heart Dean's resistance to the idea of a cleared field, who has imbibed his fellow Vermonter's disdain for the notion that there is anyplace in the country where the Democrats shouldn't compete and that there is any issue on which the Democrats should decline to engage. Sanders fought a ferocious battle in the Senate this year to provide increased benefits to veterans and their families, and he was equally ferocious in denouncing the problems with the health-care system in the Veterans Administration. In August and September, he was making this pitch, as well as inveighing against an economic system that seems increasingly rigged upwards—not in Vermont or Oregon but in South Carolina and Mississippi. And that is a response to the worst thing about accepting as axiomatic the notion of the cleared field: It strangles debate. It makes effective coalition-building beyond the mainstream impossible. Change within nothing but acceptable parameters is stillborn, and the really serious problems affecting the country get sanded over and obscured by tactics. People whose lives have been ground up over the past decade have their appeals drowned out by the hoofbeats of the horse race.

"What I'm saying," Sanders says, "is that you've got that community. Yesterday in the evening, in Raleigh, North Carolina, we spoke to over three hundred people, working people, from the AFL-CIO and other groups. Do I think those people are satisfied with what's going on in this country? Do I think that they want real change? I think they do. In Columbia, South Carolina, we had two hundred people out. We had seniors, blacks, whites—a real coalition of people—and we had a lot of them in Mississippi for the AFL-CIO.

"The bottom line is I think the Beltway mentality underestimates the frustration and the anger that people are feeling in this country with both the economic and the political status quo."

To accept the idea that Hillary Clinton has cleared the field is not merely to put the Democratic party on the razor's edge of one person's decision. It also is to give a kind of final victory to tactics over substance, to money over argument, to an easy consensus over a hard-won mandate, and ultimately, to campaigning over governing. It is an awful, sterile place for a political party to be. And that's the thing about clearing the field: Clearing the field makes it easier to cross, but there's nothing living or growing there. It bakes brown in the sun and it cracks, and the rain runs down the cracks in vain rivulets, because there's no purpose to rain that falls on an empty field. Even the crows abandon it.

Central Florida Future: “President Bill Clinton to host election rally at UCF”

By Marina A. Guerges

October 30, 2014, 12:28 a.m. EDT

Former President Bill Clinton will join Charlie Crist at UCF for an election eve rally on Nov. 3.

The event will begin at 7:30 p.m. and will be held at Memory Mall.

The public will be given access on the open lawn area at 5:30 p.m., according to a WESH report.

Additional information about the event has yet to be released. This post will be updated as information is made available.

Mediaite: “Ralph Nader on Hillary: ‘She’s a Menace to the United States of America’”

By Josh Feldman

October 29, 2014, 2:15 p.m. EDT

Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader gave an interview to WeAreChange earlier this week, and he took the opportunity to weigh in on two of the likeliest candidates to run in 2016 and how much he really doesn’t care for how they’re positioning themselves.

Hillary Clinton, first off, is far too big a “corporatist and a militarist” to lead the country. Nader said, “She thinks Obama is too weak, he doesn’t kill enough people overseas. So she’s a menace to the United States of America.”

As for Rand Paul, Nader intimated that he used to like Paul for standing against militarism and foreign interventionism, but lamented how he’s “changing by the month as he wants the White House,” fueled by power and “blind ambition.”

Watch the video below, via WeAreChange:

[VIDEO]

The New Yorker: “Elizabeth Warren Wins the Midterms”

By John Cassidy

October 29, 2014, 2:17 p.m. EDT

If you live inside the media bubble, you’ve probably heard that Elizabeth Warren, the progressive darling and self-declared non-candidate for 2016, messed up on Tuesday. Appearing on ABC’s “The View,” Warren said that Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the New Hampshire Democrat who is facing a tough challenge from Scott Brown, her Republican opponent, was “out there working for the people of Vermont.”

Cue a slew of tweets and a good deal of crowing on the right. “Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) gave an impassioned endorsement of senator Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.) on Tuesday’s The View,” the online Washington Free Beacon cackled. “The only problem was that she forgot which state Shaheen is from.” A story in the Washington Times said that “Warren looked like a political rookie.”

Since Warren, who represents the neighboring state of Massachusetts in the Senate, has spent quite a bit of time campaigning in New Hampshire with Shaheen, it seems highly unlikely that she had a true memory malfunction. It was a simple slip of the tongue. Sitting at a table with Whoopi and the other hosts, Warren was talking a mile a minute, as she invariably does, and she goofed. As the Boston Globe’s Bruce Wright noted, that’s also something she does sometimes. Appearing at the University of New Hampshire on Saturday, she said, “The people of Massachusetts are not taking Scott Brown, they’re taking Jeanne Shaheen!” Realizing her mistake, she said, “Sorry about that! Sorry about that!”

Warren isn’t infallible. But, if any Democrat is likely to emerge from the midterms as a big winner, it is she. Over the past couple of weeks, she has been barnstorming around the country, campaigning for Democratic candidates, sounding like a reincarnated Eugene Debs or (to cross party lines) Teddy Roosevelt.

“We can go through the list over and over, but at the end of every line is this: Republicans believe this country should work for those who are rich, those who are powerful, those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers,” she said in Englewood, Colorado. “I will tell you we can whimper about it, we can whine about it, or we can fight back. I’m here with Mark Udall so we can fight back.”

“Republicans, man, they ought to be wearing a T-shirt,” she said in Des Moines, Iowa. “The T-shirt should say: ‘I got mine. The rest of you are on your own.’ … We can hang back, we can whine about what the Republicans have done … or we can fight back. Me, I’m fighting back!”

Even on “The View,” Warren came across as a political pugilist who loves nothing more than climbing into the ring with the Republicans. “Under President Obama’s leadership, we fight to raise the minimum wage, we fight to reduce the interest rate on student loans, we fight for equal pay for equal work,” she told “CBS This Morning.” “It’s really about whose side do you stand on? And, for me, that’s the whole heart of it.”

After six years of watching their President being kicked around by the Republicans—and, sometimes, seeming reluctant to fight them on their own level—liberals and progressives are thrilled to have someone who dishes it right back. At some of her public appearances, there are people wearing “READY FOR WARREN” T-shirts, which represent a cheeky response to the “READY FOR HILLARY” movement. Mother Jones, in highlighting five of Warren’s best lines, noted that she’s receiving “rock star treatment.” Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post columnist, said that Warren “has become the brightest ideological and rhetorical light in a party whose prospects are dimmed by—to use a word Jimmy Carter never uttered—malaise.”

Perhaps the most ringing endorsement of Warren comes from Hillary Clinton herself. Appearing late last week with the Massachusetts senator at a campaign event for Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate for governor of the state, Clinton said, “I am so pleased to be here with your senior senator, the passionate champion for working people and middle-class families, Elizabeth Warren! … I love watching Elizabeth give it to those who deserve to get it. Standing up not only for you but people with the same needs and the same wants across our country.”

In the headline of its report on the event, the Times noted that Clinton was trying to hold an adversary close. On previous occasions, Warren has criticized the Clintons for being too friendly with Wall Street. For now, at least, hostilities appear to have been suspended. Indeed, as Clinton makes her way around the country, campaigning for embattled Democrats, she is sounding more and more like Warren. Occasionally, she even goes further than her. During her speech in Boston, she praised Coakley, who is currently the attorney general of Massachusetts, for trying to hold accountable Wall Street and big business, adding, “Don’t let anybody tell you that, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” (Clinton later qualified those remarks.)

Assuming that Clinton does run for President, Republicans are sure to throw that statement back at her. By then, she’ll be prepared for it; she might even welcome it. All indications suggest that she’s preparing to run as Lunch Pail Hillary, the up-and-at-’em scrapper for the working stiff who emerged in the later stages of her 2008 campaign. But will Warren be content to let Clinton make her arguments for her? Everything she has said implies that she will. Around the country, though, a lot of Warren supporters are still hoping that she changes her mind.

Calendar:

Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official schedule.

·  October 30 – Washington, DC: Sec. Clinton honored by The Executive Leadership Foundation (CNN)

·  October 30 – Washington, DC: Sec. Clinton will speak on ‘The Power of Women’s Economic Participation’ at Georgetown (Georgetown)

·  October 30 – College Park, MD: Sec. Clinton appears at a rally for Maryland gubernatorial candidate Anthony Brown (WaPo)

·  November 1  – New Orleans, LA: Sec. Clinton campaigns for Sen. Mary Landrieu (AP)

·  November 1  – KY: Sec. Clinton campaigns in Northern Kentucky and Lexington with Alison Lundergan Grimes (BuzzFeed)

·  November 2  – NH: Sec. Clinton appears at a GOTV rally for Gov. Hassan and Sen. Shaheen (AP)

·  December 1 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton keynotes a League of Conservation Voters dinner (Politico)

·  December 4 – Boston, MA: Sec. Clinton speaks at the Massachusetts Conference for Women (MCFW)