I'm not at Netroots Nation, but it sounds exciting. Most interesting to me was the discovery that the inimitable Charles Pierce is there. He had a great piece on Joe Biden's speech yesterday. And now he's just posted on Elizabeth Warren's.
He's been a public admirer of Warren's since before she ran against Scott Brown. And if you haven't read his long piece on her that was published in the magazine (May, I think), I highly recommend it. He's always been keen on her message, but he's also chronicled her growth as a skilled politician. For example, in the current post he notes parenthetically:
It is also to be noted that Warren was cagey enough not to mention the TPP specifically, but that her condemnation was general, and it was limited to the secrecy within which the deals are struck. Thus are options kept open. She's learning.
Of course, there's a huge longing among us for her to run for President. Pierce thinks she won't, and I think he's probably right. But the interesting point is his assessment that she will be a player in the next Presidential election even without running herself. In her speech she denounced deals 'done in secret so big corporations can do their dirty work behind closed doors'. Here's Charlie's reaction:
Even if she doesn't run, and I still think the chances she will are almost nil, this is a shot directly across the bow of the putative Democratic frontrunner. There is nothing more central to the history of the last President Clinton than the Eisenhower-lite economics with which he triangulated himself, whether that's repealing Glass-Steagall, signing the Commodities Futures Modernization Act as he went out the door, or shepherding NAFTA through Congress and fast-shuffling it past the general population. There is no way for Hillary Clinton to detach herself from that legacy even if she wanted to, and it's not clear at all that she wants to. If Warren doesn't run, she nonetheless has an obvious constituency that is growing, and to which whoever the Democratic nominee is must respond.
Meanwhile,
digby points us to Hillary Clinton's appearance on the Daily Show, which sounded some troubling notes. Here's Clinton:
What I found when I became secretary of state is that so many people in the world—especially young people—they had no memory of the United States liberating Europe and Asia, beating the Nazis, fighting the Cold War and winning, that was just ancient history. They didn’t know the sacrifices that we had made and the values that motivated us to do it. We have not been telling our story very well. We do have a great story. We are not perfect by any means, but we have a great story about human freedom, human rights, human opportunity, and let’s get back to telling it, to ourselves first and foremost, and believing it about ourselves and then taking that around the world. That’s what we should be standing for.
And here's digby's reaction:
My first reaction was hostility based upon the perception that she was saying we need to pat ourselves on the back about being exceptional more than we have been and then we'll live happily ever after. And frankly, if we wanted another round of Bushian proclamations about how "we're so good and they're so evil" I think we should probably just vote for Jeb and call it a day. But after watching it again, I realized that I might have been unfair. If what she was really getting at was a need to "find consensus" on the values that animate the Enlightenment spirit of our constitution and the Declaration of Independence, then I'm all for it. It would be the first time in our history that we were able to do it, but it's probably something worth doing.
If she's talking about some sort of "greatest country the world has ever known" boosterism, then she's not going to get very far. It's been a long time since World War II and the idea that we were widely considered to be the Good Guys during the Cold War just is not the case. We may have been considered "the better guy" in that match up by many in the western world, sure. Others disagreed. But this country did a lot of shady stuff during that era that's still haunting us today and it wasn't all in the name of "freedom and democracy."
Peter Beinart didn't like it either:
Really? Is America’s biggest post-Cold War foreign policy problem really that we’ve failed to adequately remind others, and ourselves, how good we are? After all, George W. Bush told Americans endlessly that the “war on terror” was another grand American crusade for freedom, in the tradition of World War II and the Cold War. In his second inaugural address and other thundering rhetorical displays, he announced to the world that America would champion liberty far and wide, as in days of old.
I'm not a Clinton hater, and I'd far rather elect her than lose the Presidency, but this is an example of why I'm less that completely enthusiastic about the prospect.