Saturday, November 19, 2011

Elizabeth Warren Surges Past Obama In?

Is Elizabeth Warren Standing on the Other Side of the Mirror Obama Can't Find?

Elizabeth Warren arrives on top of America's Good Ethics List so often that people are now seeing her perhaps as not only Obama's answer to himself, but the conscience of Obama, his better self, better half, manifest hope. Should we read between the lines? Will she, won't she run for president in the near future? Didn't Hillary start as Senator? Without the pincers on the neck of Hillary as a passenger in Bill's car and now Obama's car, Warren comes to the people in her own car, at least in the driver's seat, and she's turning heads:
Even though she’s running for the Senate and not for the presidency, the early devotion to Warren recalls the ardor once felt by many for Obama. On its face, this is odd: Warren is not a world-class orator, she is not young or shiny or new, she doesn’t fizz with the promise of American possibility that made the Obama campaign pop. Instead, she’s a mild-mannered Harvard bankruptcy-law professor and a grandmother of three, a member of the older-white-lady demographic (she’s 62) that was written off in 2008 as being the antimatter of hope and change.
And yet, on a deeper level, her popularity makes perfect sense. Embracing Warren as the next “one” is, in part, a way of getting over Obama; she provides an optimistic distraction from the fact that under our current president, too little has changed, for reasons having to do both with the limitations of the political system and the limitations of the man. She makes people forget that estimations of him were too overheated, trust in his powers too fervid. As the feminist philanthropist Barbara Lee told me of Warren, “This moment of disillusion is why people find her so compelling, because she brings forth the best in people and she brings back that excitement.”

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