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The New Republic's big profile of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and the hastily-built and quickly-challenged pedestal under New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie are 2016 fantasy football picks. People are pretending Democrats might nominate an extreme partisan and that the Republicans might not. This is mostly due to boredom. We're at the point of 2016 fantasizing during which we couch our "what-ifs" in "hows." Pundits embrace unlikely nominee possibilities, and weave complicated narratives of what can be done over the next three years to move from unlikely to inevitable.
Warren has emerged as an unlikely vehicle for that speculation. The "Elizabeth Warren for President 2016" Facebook page has a rather respectable 8,000 likes. Daily Kos is trying to gin up financial support. The idea has been raised by the Boston Herald, the Post, and, you know, The Atlantic.
Most recently, the cause was taken up by The New Republic's Noam Scheiber. The case Scheiber makes for Warren's 2016 candidacy falls squarely in the realm of the theoretical. "[I]nevitable candidates have a way of becoming distinctly evitable," the magazine writes, suggesting that Clinton is no more certain to grab the nomination in 2016 than she was in 2008. The Democratic party, it argues, has a new-found disdain for the center and the Democratic-leaning bankers that lie within. Warren is decently positioned for a presidential run, absent Clinton, being closer to early-primary state New Hampshire than was Palin to Russia. And New York City just elected a populist in a landslide; public outcry submarined Larry Summers' bid to lead the Federal Reserve.