The Imaginary Warren V. Clinton Nomination Battle

There has been a tremendous amount of speculation about Elizabeth Warren running for the 2016 nomination despite her statements that she is not running. Many political articles give the impression that Warren is Clinton’s chief opponent for the nomination. This speculation has been kept alive by interviews in which Warren answered in the present tense that she is not running, but evaded questions as to whether she might run in the future. The Wall Street Journal now reports that she has given an answer to a question posed in the future tense.

The Massachusetts Democrat has for months gently patted away questions about her presidential ambitions with a present-tense “I am not running for president.”

But in an interview published Tuesday in Fortune magazine, Ms. Warren gave a categorical response to the future-tense question: “Are you going to run for president?”

“No,” Ms. Warren responded to Sheila Bair, the former FDIC chairman who conducted the interview.

Ms. Warren’s apparently firm rejection of a future presidential campaign breaks from her previous hedged answers, in which she said she was not at that moment running but did not appear to rule out launching a campaign in the future.

Of course the large number of people who have run after first denying such intentions, including Barack Obama, will probably result in continued articles about Warren running.

Meanwhile Dick Morris’ Just Say No to Hillary PAC isn’t doing very well. David Weigel reports that the PAC has not received a single donation. This probably says more about the declining influence of Dick Morris than any decline in anti-Clinton sentiment among the conservative donors Morris was hoping to attract.