This article is adapted from a case study commissioned by the Brookings Institution as part of its Profiles In Negotiation project. The full Brookings paper on the veterans deal is available here. Jill Lawrence is a columnist for Creators Syndicate and a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report.

Love her or hate her, Elizabeth Warren knows exactly who she is. When she took tennis lessons years ago, Warren hit so many balls over fences, hedges and buildings that her instructor—now her husband—considered her his worst student ever. “Once I had a weapon in my hand, I gave it everything I had,” she explained in her autobiography.

Today, the Massachusetts senator is deploying seemingly every political weapon at her disposal in defense of the middle class—and, in typical fashion, giving it everything she’s got. Aggressive, intense, single-minded—she is all of these, and that’s why she’s considered such a formidable advocate for families trying to survive on what she calls “the ragged edge.” But for all the same reasons, Warren would be miscast in the roles of presidential contender and president—and why would liberals want her to take that road, anyway? Warren’s attention would be diverted in a thousand different directions by a campaign. If she somehow managed to dethrone Hillary Clinton and win the White House, say good-bye to public dressings-down of Wall Street executives at Senate hearings and—most likely—to no-holds-barred attacks on “sleazy lobbyists,” “cowardly politicians” and banks that cheat families.


Being president, or even just running for president, would dilute what the left loves best about Warren and also, perhaps, what the nation needs most from her. Being speculated about as a candidate for president, on the other hand, sometimes can be useful. Back in 1991, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia told me he did not discourage speculation about a run for president because he was thrilled by the attention it generated for his ideas on health policy. So it is with Warren. She remains vastly influential as long as she retains her unique role in the national conversation. But if she actually were to run, all that would change. And her record so far suggests she knows it.

Warren often seems exasperated by all the presidential talk—and at the end of 2013, she pledged to serve out her Senate term—but more recently she has been playing a minimalist version of the speculation game. She is sounding less certain about what’s ahead, and she consistently uses the present tense in her repeated denials of interest, conspicuously avoiding a Shermanesque vow never, ever to run or serve.

Even these slight openings have been succor for the draft-Warren movement launched last month by MoveOn.org and Democracy for America. Giving the keynote this week at the AFL-CIO’s first National Summit on Wages, Warren also sounded like she was consciously leading a national movement, repeatedly declaring “what we believe” is needed to take back the economy from politicians who “made deliberate choices that favored those with money and power.”

Yet if one looks more closely at what Warren is doing than what she is saying, very little of it suggests that she is thinking about the presidency at all. She has doubled down on her longtime causes instead of broadening her portfolio in ways that are typical preparation for a presidential run. Her rhetoric, meanwhile, is as sharp and confrontational as ever. Congress should have “broken you into pieces,” Warren said of Citigroup recently on the Senate floor. In one of her final fundraising emails of 2014, she vowed to continue her fight for “accountability and a level playing field so nobody steals your purse on Main Street, or your pension on Wall Street.”

She is also 65 years old, and if it’s not going to happen now, it may be never.

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Warren’s rise from obscure law professor into fiery national advocate for the disadvantaged has hardly been an accident, and her background says a lot about where her passions lie now. The Oklahoma native spent most of her professional life teaching at Harvard Law School but says she grew up “ hanging on to the edge of the middle class by my fingernails” after her father had a heart attack and lost his job. Her parents lost their car and almost lost their house. As a young law professor, Warren did pioneering research on bankruptcy and discovered that its chief victims were families in crisis over an illness, a divorce or a lost job—families just like her own.

Thus was born her career as the nemesis of a financial system that she viewed even before the 2008 Wall Street collapse as complicit in a “rigged” system that fostered debt, foreclosures, bankruptcy and other ways to ruin low- and middle-income Americans. It was a straight line from there to her 2009 role overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (aka the bank bailout) and, in 2010, setting up the new federal agency that was her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans, corporate America and even some Democrats were so alarmed by the prospect of Warren actually running the bureau that Obama chose someone else as its permanent director. But Warren turned the rejection into an improbable Senate victory in Massachusetts in 2012.

What she did when she arrived was telling. She joined three committees that are platforms for fighting Wall Street and income inequality: the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; and the Special Committee on Aging (she’s adding Energy and Natural Resources this year). “She seems to be advertising her depth, not her breadth,” said one past and potentially future adviser to Clinton.

That’s a huge contrast to White House prospects past and present. As a new senator in 2005, Barack Obama joined the Foreign Relations and Homeland Security committees. Republicans Marco Rubio and Rand Paul are on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence panels. Ted Cruz is on Armed Services, as was Clinton during her Senate tenure. All have used the Senate to educate themselves on issues that face commanders in chief. If Warren suddenly turned up on one of those committees, we might wonder about her stated indifference to a White House campaign. But she hasn’t—suggesting she might understand herself and her place in national politics better than some of her fans do.

Consider a typical December day for President Obama. He talked to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe about his reelection and to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott about the coffee-shop hostage tragedy in Sydney. He appeared in the Cabinet Room to announce a dramatic shift in Cuba policy. He issued a list of commutations and pardons. He gave remarks at two back-to-back Hanukkah receptions at the White House. And that’s only what was evident from a public schedule and press notifications.

Warren obviously studies up and votes on diverse issues in Congress and handles the full range of concerns of her Massachusetts constituents. She’s no doubt perfectly capable of developing expertise on anything that might face a president. But would she want to, and would that be the best way for her to serve? Right now she is the public figure most identified with trying to make Washington work for ordinary Americans. It’s hard to think of anyone else who could match her record of getting both headlines and results.

Almost all new senators have experience serving in or at least running for elective office, and those that don’t often come from the business world. That makes Warren quite unusual. The Senate Historian’s Office gave me the names of three academics who became senators. But unlike Warren, they had all been steeped in politics for decades as candidates, strategists, advisers and organizers. Paul Douglas of Illinois won a race for Chicago City Council and lost one for the Senate before winning his seat. Minnesota’s Paul Wellstone ran for state auditor and chaired two presidential campaigns in his state. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a veteran of four presidential administrations who once ran for president of the New York City Council, was a domestic-policy expert who also had served as a United Nations ambassador and U.S. ambassador to India.

The Senate class of 2014 further underscores Warren’s rare path. The new senators include six House members, two state legislators, one former governor, one former state attorney general, one business executive and one—Ben Sasse of Nebraska—who has been a presidential aide, a House chief of staff, a business consultant and a university president. Obama, whose alleged inexperience was a top Republican talking point in 2008, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature before he won a Senate seat in 2004. Imagine if, comparable to Warren, he had run for the Senate as a full-time University of Chicago professor with a singular, longstanding focus on the plight of low-income neighborhoods (the type he once served as a community organizer).

Even more illustrative, imagine if Ralph Nader had tried for and won the White House in the thick of his role as a transformational consumer advocate in the 1960s and 1970s. Working from outside government, he inspired passage of more than a dozen landmark laws including the Freedom of Information Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act and others that set safety standards for vehicles, meat, air, water, offices, mines, pipelines and consumer products. From within the Oval Office, with his prickly personality and myriad urgent issues of all kinds demanding his attention, would Nader’s contribution have been so immense?

The groups behind the draft-Warren movement are convinced that she would have more impact on the national debate as a candidate, and that she would keep up the same fight at the White House. “Nobody thinks she’ll be president and go Washington on them,” says Ilya Sheyman, executive director of MoveOn.org Political Action. Nor are the Warren forces daunted by Clinton’s dominance (she was at 60-plus percent in December polls of a theoretical Democratic primary field, while Warren drew 9 to 13 percent). Warren’s message is so powerful and resonant, Warren fans say, that she could go all the way. And they’re adamant that they can run a draft-Warren campaign without doing harm to Clinton. “The hunger for Elizabeth Warren comes out of sense that she has a vision and a track record that meets the moment, and not a reflection on any other candidates. Our campaign will be entirely positive and entirely focused on Elizabeth Warren,” Sheyman says.

But all of those are arguable propositions. Whatever the moment, first of all, presidents rarely get to govern the way they intend. Bill Clinton did not campaign on pledges to raise taxes or balance the federal budget, but faced with deficits, that’s what he did. George W. Bush called education the civil rights issue of our time and looked to education as his legacy. Then 9/11 happened, and he became a highly controversial war president. Obama was the anti-war contender who would end U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the rise of the Islamic State and regional chaos have forced him to be, like Bush, a wartime commander in chief. There is no telling what a President Warren might face, and whether it would have anything to do with the problems she has devoted her life to studying and solving.

Second, Warren’s message is powerful precisely because she doesn’t have to calibrate it or depart from it. She is free to stake out positions without worrying about the give-and-take and practicalities of governing. In pursuit of a “grand bargain” to get a handle on the soaring federal debt, for instance, Obama once proposed curbing the growth of Social Security cost of living adjustments; Warren, by contrast, wants to increase Social Security payments. He has nominated Antonio Weiss to be Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance; she has led a campaign to kill the nomination because he is a Wall Street veteran who helped Burger King escape U.S. tax obligations.

Warren tried and failed to get House Democrats to defeat a massive “cromnibus” budget bill over a provision that, at the behest of Citigroup, loosened a 2010 restriction on big banks and (in her words) put taxpayers “right back on the hook” to bail them out. When it moved to the Senate, she went after Citigroup for “its grip over policymaking” in Congress and the executive branch in a floor speech that Democracy for America called “a model of historically transformative political rhetoric.” Obama, however, signed the bill because it had money to fight Ebola and the Islamic State, preserved his immigration and health policies, and funded the government until fall 2015. That’s even though he agreed with Warren on the merits.

The purest messengers hold appeal to some in both parties, but support for them would come at a cost, no matter how positive the campaign. Even if Warren ran and was nothing but nice regarding Clinton, the race inevitably would be all about the contrast between her fiery, stand-your-ground populism and Clinton’s longstanding membership in the Democratic establishment—in particular her eight years representing Wall Street as a senator from New York. Also, the purist message is inconsistent with the qualities of recent presidential winners. Obama was the candidate who saw not red or blue states but “one America, red, white and blue.” Bush 43 similarly said he was a uniter, not a divider. While those have proven to be largely unattainable goals, polling shows voters overwhelmingly favor compromise over standoffs and absolutism.

Perhaps the strongest rationale for a Warren run is to elevate her impact. But she is already having plenty. A team player, she has been a prodigious fundraiser and campaigner for conservative as well as liberal Democrats. She is a wellspring of policy and messaging ideas for her party, such as her bill to let some people refinance their student debt. Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, just added her to the Democratic leadership lineup. “She obviously has created a ton of clout for herself,” says one Democratic strategist, adding that the Reid move alone “speaks volumes about the power base she’s created.”

Nader in his heyday did not need a White House campaign to be influential, and Warren is proving that she doesn’t, either. She is already in the best place possible to give it everything she has on the issues that keep her up at night.