The Next President

I doubt this predicition will come true - most don't, but as I was listening to Elizabeth Warren's interview on Pod Save America this week, I realized she's just about the perfect candidate to be elected President in 2020. While I certainly agree with some of her policy positions, this is not an endorsement, just an observation that she possess most of the hard-to-come-by qualities that makes somebody electable.

She's fiercely partisan and ultra-competitive, those are essential qualities for someone to even bother entering the modern Presidential selection process. She might care some about specific issues, but she cares most about beating the other guy. You can hear the edge in her voice if you listen closely - she's a killer and she doesn't like to lose. Even the seemingly most laid back Presidents have this drive. You can read stories about Jimmy Carter's competitiveness - he was a little-known Georgia governor running for President because he wanted it and he wanted to win. That's what it takes (for better or, well, just for worse, probably, but thems the facts).

The key for Warren, though, is that she comes off so relatively harmless. She's an actual grandma. She's got the right tone to her voice and an accent that disarms people. There's a smile underneath her speech most of the time. It's folksy and charismatic and is incongruous with her actual position in life. It's the Bill Clinton magic that endears people to her. You need that to win, too (ask Ted Cruz).

When it comes to the issues, well, she speaks to working class people - that's her policy passion and her political lane. She's a populist to the core with an intellectual's ability to explain populist ideas in a way that sounds mainstream to people in the mainstream. It's like if Bernie Sanders baked you cookies and had a better sense of style.

She's even got a killer story about how a living minimum wage saved her family from homelessness during her childhood. Narrative matters - maybe not as much anymore as soundbytes, but she's got those too.

I know this isn't a profound analysis of Elizabeth Warren, her politics or politics in general. There's no real depth here as you've commonly come to expect from this blog. In reality, I needed something to post today and this was the thing that most piqued my interest that didn't involve a mental breakdown over Trump's Paris Accords speech (maybe Tuesday - we'll see - that guy is an idiot).

Happy reading - and if the 11/1 odds do, in fact, pay off, you can say you heard it here first.