Elizabeth Warren

...This Sunday, just hours before the Super Bowl, more than 20 people trickled into a windowless basement room of Washington, D.C.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Like more than 200 other meetings that convened across the country through Run Warren Run, the group strategized how to convince the Massachusetts senator to say yes.

“I’ve heard questions before, like, ‘I heard that she’s not running,’” one of the organizers, who asked to go only by his first name, Carl, said. “But they all say they’re not going to run before they run.” For many in the room, it’s Warren’s hesitance to self-promote that has won her so much respect.

Though the organizers asked participants to avoid trash-talking Clinton, Carl opened the meeting by calling for more than “a coronation” in the Democratic primary. Participants said that the sense of Clinton’s inevitability was a threat to the democratic process, and described Clinton as “Republican lite,” “in the pocket of big business,” and “completely unacceptable.” Zephyr Williams, a graduate student at American University, explained her wariness with establishment politicians. “I can imagine it’s difficult to avoid selling out when you’ve been in politics for as long as Hillary has,” she said, underlining what many in the group saw as Warren’s key strength as an outsider to politics. Others criticized Clinton for her hawkish foreign policy and support amongst Wall Street bankers.

Participants praised Warren as a “fighter” for the middle class, waging war against Wall Street even at the expense of her own party. Many progressives cheered for Warren when she scuttled President Obama's renomination of former Lazard banker Antonio Weiss to a top Treasury Department post. Warren's bill to help students refinance their loans, which was blocked in the Senate in September, also placed her on the radar screens of many young Democrats. Part of the Run Warren Run's strategy is to raise awareness of the senator, since many voters aren't as familiar with Warren as they are with Clinton. "To know Elizabeth Warren is to love her," said one meeting attendee.

So far, polls have shown Clinton far outpacing any other Democratic challengers in the polls, and Politico reported that the frontrunner is considering delaying her campaign, since her campaign sees no serious contender in the ranks. But in September, a WSJ/NBC poll found that only 43 percent of voters viewed Clinton favorably, compared to 41 percent who had negative views....

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120928/run-warren-run-meeting-dc-hillary-clinton-republican-lite