If Elizabeth Warren had to repeat herself this many times inside her Harvard Law classroom, she would have had to start failing students.
On Friday, the first-term Massachusetts senator sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission saying, yet again, she did not want to be a presidential candidate. In the letter, first reported by the Boston Globe, Warren’s lawyer, Marc Elias, disavows any involvement or support for Ready For Warren, an effort to encourage the Massachusetts senator to run for President.
Elias writes, “This letter serves as a formal disavowal of the organization and its activity. The Senator has not, and does not, explicitly or implicitly, authorize, endorse, or otherwise approve of the organization’s activities.” He goes on to emphasize, “To the contrary, Senator Warren has publicly announced that she is not running for president in 2016.” Elias then chastises Ready For Warren for "confusing donors about a non-existent run for president."
Warren has had to endure presidential speculation even before she was elected to the Senate in 2012. Many liberal Democrats have focused on her as their one hope for a candidate who could wrest the party’s nomination from Hillary Clinton in 2016 in what seems to be an otherwise unimpressive field. The problem is that the Massachusetts senator has never seemed to have the fire to run for the White House. After all, Warren only entered into electoral politics after Senate Republicans thwarted her nomination to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She’s only a politician because she couldn’t become a bureaucrat.
This letter won’t entirely calm the speculation. As potential candidates go, Warren still has much higher name ID than Martin O’Malley and is a far more plausible candidate than Bernie Sanders. It just shows that some Democrats are so eager to find an alternative to Hillary Clinton that they are promoting the candidacy of someone who has repeatedly stated that that she won’t run for President. But, then again, it’s hard to blame those anti-Clinton Democrats. After all, first-term senators who are former law professors do have a strong track record running against Hillary Clinton.
