Last week, the progressive groups Democracy for America and MoveOn.Org joined the Ready for Warren camp in its efforts to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as the Democratic candidate for president in 2016. On Friday,more than 330 former Obama staff members wrote a letter also urging the freshman senator to enter the race.
“We believed in an unlikely candidate who no one thought had a chance,” reads the letter. “We worked for him — and against all odds, we won in Iowa. We organized like no campaign had organized before — and won the Democratic primary.”
“We know that the improbably is far from impossible,” it continues. “Now, former staffers from President Obama’s campaigns, along with former staffers from [Organizing for America], are joining with the thousands of Americans who are calling on Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2016.”
The signees, which include several chief officers, directors, and managers from both Obama campaigns, site rising inequality as the “challenge of our time,” saying that they “want someone who will stand up for working families and take on Wall Street banks and special interests that took down our economy.”
Sen. Warren’s tireless efforts to work for the poor, middle class, and college students crippled by debt, make her an almost, if not completely, perfect progressive candidate.
Most recently, Warren has been fighting the new government spending bill over it’s provisions that are essentially Wall Street handouts and arguing against Obama’s new Treasury Department nominee over his ties to corporate inversions as head of the financial giant Lazard.
“What happened in the midterms is very much a sign that we need Warren-type candidates,” Erica Sagrans, who runs Ready for Warren, told Vox last month. “And that the thing you really need to start with as a candidate is really the authenticity and vision that Warren has that excites people. The money and everything like that can come later.”
It’s likely that the former Obama staffers are pushing for Warren because she is the candidate that they, and we, had hoped he would be. We had hoped Obama would push back against Wall Street and its political influence, rather than embracing it.
Despite her persistent assertion that she is has no intentions of running in 2016, hopefully the overwhelming support from the progressive base of the party will help change Sen. Warren’s mind. We need a candidate who will fight back against the one percent and bring back the middle class the country so desperately needs.
