Nearly all reports from the Hillary Clinton brain trust suggest Senator Tim Kaine is the runaway favorite to be the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 2016.

There are soft spots in this consensus. For instance, the Clinton campaign is apparently not 100 percent convinced that Donald Trump will walk away from next month’s convention in Cleveland as the Republican nominee. Clinton’s allies think there’s a small but real chance she’ll be running against a candidate who isn’t fatally flawed himself (or mortally wounded for having deposed Trump). If that did happen, a more electric candidate might rocket to the top of her short list.

But Kaine-as-default-choice is what Clinton-world sources are telling reporters, and what they say matches conventional wisdom, which for several weeks has held that Clinton will pick him. The Virginia senator is ideologically closer to Clinton than Elizabeth Warren. He’s also temperamentally closer to Clinton than Warren, and his choice would be reflective of Clinton’s famous aversion to political risk. Kaine isn’t a progressive firebrand, so he won’t overshadow Clinton—and by the same token, he doesn’t come fully loaded with the powerful enemies Warren has earned.





The conventional wisdom, in other words, makes a lot of sense. But that doesn’t make it actually wise. The case for Warren as vice president is stronger than Kaine boosters allow, and stronger in sum than the case for Kaine—or for anybody else Clinton might choose.

There are actually three cases against Warren as VP—one from Warren’s own perspective, one from Clinton’s, and one from the Democratic Party’s. The Warren case holds that the Senate is a more natural place for a political figure who has her own power base, values her independence, and intends to use political influence in consequential ways. This is a strong argument, undermined most significantly by the fact that Warren herself doesn’t seem to believe it. She has been signaling her desire to be Clinton’s running mate loudly, and in many different ways, ever since Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination.