One of the usually unspoken reasons that potential rivals are scared of running is that they know Team Hillary pulled its punches against Obama in 2008 — in large part because he was African American. When Bill Clinton compared Obama’s primary victory in South Carolina historically to those of Jesse Jackson in the same state, he was viciously attacked; for the rest of the campaign, he was relatively mute. “I think that they played the race card on me,” Clinton complained to WHYY Radio in Philadelphia in April 2008. “We now know, from memos from the campaign and everything, that they planned to do it all along.”
It’s fairly certain that Elizabeth Warren, if she ran, would not receive such a pass from Team Hillary, which is famous for playing both mean and creatively. In 2008, it saw many of its anti-Obama themes injected into the media mainstream via the Drudge Report. An investigation by Britain’s Daily Telegraph established that Clinton supporters, especially an ex-deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania, were “largely to blame for starting” the untruth that Obama had been born outside the U.S.
A ready-made army of liberal bloggers and surrogates would stand ready to belittle Warren’s lack of political experience and foreign-policy credentials.
And then there would be the character shots.
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