Why Hillary Clinton Needs Elizabeth Warren on the Democratic Ticket

The latest word is that Elizabeth Warren is not likely to be the Democratic nominee for Vice-President. “Warren is a favorite of liberal Democrats, though an all-female ticket is unlikely,” the Times concluded on Sunday, in a report on Hillary Clinton’s Vice-Presidential search that names eight less-famous possibilities before the former Harvard law professor. (It was, to be fair to Warren’s prospects, an article that leaned on the observations of a body-language expert.) On Monday, Politico reported that unnamed Wall Street Democratic donors did not believe that Clinton would pick Warren, and might withhold their contributions if she did. Speculation like this is called Kremlinology, but at this stage of a Presidential campaign nothing so solid as a Kremlin surrounds a candidate, just a network of conditional relationships that may soon evaporate. What we do know is that a Washington lawyer has begun the archaic process of “vetting” ten candidates—as if some secrets from their past might be more important to their reception than the pose they strike in public. We also know that, for many people, Clinton is not really making ten important decisions but one: Warren or someone else.