What does it mean when "The Fix" says not to underestimate Elizabeth Warren?

Seriously, have the Villagers seriously started to take Elizabeth Warren seriously?

by Ken

As I mentioned last night, I was taken aback yesterday by a posting on washingtonpost.com's "The Fix" blog. Not so much for the story it purported to report, but for a dramatic shift in Village perception which the fact of such a report from such a source.

Backing up a bit, once upon a time -- oh, say back in the days before Nixon Went to China -- the vast and tumultuous expanse of the People's Republic was a cypher to us, and as old-timers will recall, American obsevers were largely reduced to intepreting cryptic wall postings in Hong Kong for "news" of what was happening in the forbidden empire.

I often get a similar feeling about the way we get "news" from that mysterious Village on the Potomac. From it emanate strange and often incomprehensible burblings, which make little sense on their own but sometimes, with resourceful piecing together and contextualizing, tell us something about Village life, something that might even have bearing on real life as lived in these United States.

For me, one of the chief modern-day equivalents of those old Hong Kong wall postings is washingtonpost.com's "The Fix" blog. What matters isn't so much the literal message as what its promulgation can be decoded to tell us.

Here's the item:

Why you shouldn't underestimate Elizabeth Warren

By Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan, Published: August 6 at 6:30 am

When we first put freshman Sen. Elizabeth Warren on our rankings of the 10 Democrats most likely to wind up as the party's presidential nominee in 2016, many people scoffed.

She just got elected! She's not interested in running! It's too damn early! Get off my lawn! (All but that last one is true.)

But, a new Quinnipiac poll proves why Warren would be formidable in 2016 if she decided to run. Using a feeling thermometer -- 0 meaning you feel totally cold about a politician, 100 meaning you feel warmly (aka) strong favorably toward a pol -- Quinnipiac tested the majority of major national figures.

Warren finished third -- behind only New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (53.1 degrees) and Hillary Clinton (52.1 degrees).  She finished ahead of, among others, President Obama, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Vice President Joe Biden.

Here's why the thermometer matters — and matters for Warren in particular. It's a measure of passion, which is, of course, the sine qua non of politics. While passion isn't everything -- fundraising matters, organization matters -- it's hard to get elected to anything without passionate supporters.

And, Warren quite clearly evokes that passion. Need examples beyond the poll? Warren collected more than $42 million for her 2012 Senate campaign, a massive sum that is indicative of the passion -- and national following -- that Warren evokes. Then there is the speech she gave at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, which, if you forgot, was among the best received addresses of the gathering.

All of the above is not to say Warren is running for president. She has avoided most national press -- and the press more generally -- since coming to Washington and her political team insist that she is genuinely un-intrigued by a run for president.

We buy that. But, we have watched  campaigns long enough to understand that the ability to evoke genuine, organic passion in potential voters is the rarest and most critical of all candidate characteristics. Warren has that ability, whether or not she wants to use it in 2016 -- or beyond.

Now I could hardly be less interested in the 2016 presidential handicapping. For goodness' sake, you'd think we didn't still face another tortured year and a half of the Congress from Hell, unlucky no. 113, ducking as many of its responsibilities as it can possibly get away with while, at least on the House side, seeing how much mayhem it can whip up gnawing away its irrelevancies and imbecilities. And a whole congressional election season, with everything else that will be on ballots across the country in 2014.

Simple question: To what extent could we have foreseen the wonder that was the 2012 presidential election season in 2009?

What interests me about this "Fix" item is that Elizabeth Warren is being talked about seriously. No, I don't think of her as a serious presidential prospect -- on the most obvious level, she seems much too smart to want to do that to herself -- but in Village tribal life, the fact that she's being talked about with respect rather than condescension or outright scorn strikes me as revolutionary.

If you think back to the way the Village media demonized her back when she was being talked about by a lot of us as the obvious choice to be the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been her own idea, and then all through her contemplation of the Massachusetts Senate run and the actual campaign, the transformation is almost unimaginable. She was pigeonholed as some sort of flaming revolutionary from that hotbed of socialism Harvard. Never mind that the characterization was always preposterous -- Senator Warren is a prevailingly sober moderate who happens to believe in basic fairness in the marketplace and elsewhere in public life, and actually seems to have some real belief in the things she believes. In Village terms, though, that's pretty much the definition of flaming radicalism, and in Village life, perception is reality.

So when "The Fix," the house organ of Village prognostication, tells us that we shouldn't underestimate Elizabeth Warren as a 2016 presidential contender, the message I receive is that the senator may actually need to be taken seriously as a senator -- you know, in all those messes that the 113th Congress and its dreaded successor the 114th will be mangling.

#

For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."