Would Elizabeth Warren as vice president really be good for liberals? - by Matthew Yglesias

[DonViejo]

Amid the push by liberals to get Hillary Clinton to elevate Elizabeth Warren to the vice presidency, some wonder whether this would be much of a promotion at all. After all, as one of the best-known senators and the major liberal factional leader, Warren has considerable autonomy to pick fights and wage crusades. As veep, she’d lose capacity for autonomous action in exchange for an unclear upside. She’s too old to use the vice presidency as a launch pad for a future presidential race, and the vice presidency is not itself a powerful office.

Traditionally, vice presidents are chosen for near-term coalition-building reasons, not due to a desire to give the chosen politicians more power. John Adams and Aaron Burr served as vice presidents under George Washington and Thomas Jefferson respectively, in both cases primarily in order to add northern heft to Virginia-based administrations. Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president was a New England radical put on the ticket to balance out Abe’s moderate Midwestern persona. His second VP was a border-state white supremacist Democrat put on the ticket to broaden the ideological appeal of the Civil War coalition. Dwight Eisenhower put Richard Nixon on the ticket to appease the right-wing faction of the GOP, while Ronald Reagan added George H.W. Bush to appease the moderate faction.

And sure enough, all these men found the vice presidency to be a frustrating office. Adams dubbed himself His Irrelevancy. FDR’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, famously proclaimed the office to be worth less than a warm bucket of piss. HBO’s broad political satire is called Veep for a reason — the vice president is the ultimate comic figure in American politics, proximate to power but personally powerless.

On the other hand, the practical prestige of the vice presidency has risen in recent decades. Modern veeps routinely get face time with the president, a precious Washington commodity denied to most Cabinet secretaries and almost all senators. As VP, Warren could be the most powerful liberal insider in decades — pressing her distinctive agenda on trust busting, financial reform, and other issues.

more
http://www.vox.com/2016/7/6/12092070/elizabeth-warren-vp-good-liberals

[JaneyVee]

1. Clinton/Warren 2016

[DonViejo]

2. No, no, no....

I want my U.S. Senator to remain in the Senate and become a leader there.

[frazzled]

3. She would be stupid to take it

As the article stated, the vice presidency is a pretty powerless position (unless you're Dick Cheney and your president is a lazy GWB). She'd have to be the courier and supporter of anything Clinton decides (not a role I think she's all that cut out to play), and when the term or terms are over, she's done. Senators can serve into their 80s or 90s. So unless she wants to be somebody else's flunky and then go into retirement, I'd say she's better off in the Senate.

But then what do I know about people's motivations? I could be very wrong about what she's looking for.