December 16, 2014--Ready for Elizabeth Warren?

Elizabeth Warren has the perfect job for her. Senior senator from Massachusetts.

But like another senator, this one from Illinois, though she has served in the Senate for just two years, already there is a groundswell of interest in her running for President in 2016.

We know how the former junior senator from Illinois who in 2008 did manage to be elected President worked out.

So this is just what we don't need--another Harvard Law School professor as a potential President.

But support for her is growing exponentially since she took the lead in opposing the recent appropriation bill to fund the federal government. As an academic specialist in bankruptcy law and a progressive she was the ideal person to take the lead. Her objection to the bill was because buried in it was a provision to gut that part of Dodd-Frank that is designed to rein in big banks' ability to invest in risky derivatives, the loses from which would be covered again by the taxpayers, just as they were six years ago when these very sort of practices nearly bankrupted the country and cost us many billions to bail them out.

But President Warren?

She is adamantly denying that she is running or has any interest in running. And as long as Hillary Clinton is healthy enough to run, Warren undoubtedly will be true to her word. But if Hillary is seen to falter or falls down again and hits her head on the bathtub, Elizabeth Warren will be first in line to announce her candidacy.

In my work I have known hundreds of professors and the one thing they love more than anything is professing. Professing before as large an audience as possible.

Considering that whoever runs and ultimately gets elected will face so much resistance from Congress to any legislative agenda that nothing but the minimum will have any change of becoming law. There is that much rancorous partisanship on both sides plus a powerful antigovernment movement within the Republican congressional caucus. Thus, what we should be looking for in a potential president is someone who knows how to lead and, especially, run things.

Run things such as the Pentagon, the veterans administration, the IRS, the C.I.A., the federal health care system, federal involvement in education policy, whatever environmental protection programs that will manage to survive, border security and immigration policy, and of course our various global diplomatic and military involvements.

Is Elizabeth Warren ready for all this and more? Has she demonstrated any capacity to take on any of this? I think not.

But among progressives who want an ideologue in the race there is a growing ReadyForWarren movement that parallels ReadyForHillary. And money is flowing in, mainly from the West and East Coasts. Again, just what we don't need.

Above all, if we want an effective president, not just one who makes us feel warm and fuzzy and affirms our pieties, we should be looking for someone who has a demonstrated track record of actually having run something big, run it effectively, and one  who, like Warren to her considerable credit, knows that this time around, "It's the middle class, stupid."