Elizabeth Warren has arrived and so have we [View all]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/12/1351333/-Elizabeth-Warren-has-arrived-and-so-have-we

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has become the rockstar that Barack Obama once was. The difference is that she's already in a position to effect both the national conversation and U.S. governance. When Obama announced himself on the scene in 2004, he was still just running for U.S. Senate. That meant that he was in a position to change the national conversation (which he did) but not necessarily to mold its policy. And when he got the U.S. Senate, he was already eyeing a run for president, so we will never really know what he might have done or wanted to do as a senator.

Not so with Warren. We know what she wants to do (stick up for the little guy), has the expertise to do (protect average consumers from big money interests) and is increasingly doing with expert effect. Thursday, in many ways, Warren arrived on the national political stage as a force to be reckoned with—not simply as a conversation changer but as a steward of policy. This week, Warren became the progressive litmus-test, a one-woman gatekeeper that must be consulted on the way to enacting any law, or at least those that fall within her policy wheelhouse. (We can only hope the right-wingers in the GOP stay as unruly as ever because they will force Boehner to appeal to the Warren-Pelosi tag team in order to get anything through the House.)

Many on the left want Warren to run for president for obvious reasons. In many ways, she is proving herself to be the person that the left yearned for but Obama never actually was. Earlier this week, Moveon.org launched a million-dollar effort to draft Warren for president and on Friday a group of 300 Obama alums signed an open letter urging her to run because, as they put it, they already knew what is was like to believe "in an unlikely candidate who no one thought had a chance."

Warren is not likely to run. As Markos wrote in July, she's not running and that's a good thing. In that post, Markos noted that she doesn't have the ego to run, that doing so would marginalize her, that Hillary would crush her, and that she has all the perch she needs to effect both policy and the national conversation right there in the Senate. Never was that more clear than this week. On every bill the congressional leadership negotiates they will now have to wonder, "What will Warren do?" And at every turn during her presidential run, Hillary Clinton will have to answer the questions that Elizabeth Warren plants in the national conscience.