Conventional wisdom has said since Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012, that Hillary Clinton would clearly be the Democratic nominee in 2016. However, the rift within the party between the progressive wing and the “Clinton” wing seems to be growing and that narrative is becoming murkier.
Report from the Washington Post:
The tension — shown in high relief during the messy final days of the congressional session — is in some ways a mirror image of the stresses within the Republican Party, which has been divided between its tea party and establishment factions in recent years.
In the case of both parties, the argument pits the more populist, purist elements of the base against the more pragmatic center.
For Democrats, “it is a conflict that was looking for an occasion,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who was a policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton. “The election provided the occasion.”
Having lost big in November, two wings within the party have been trading recriminations over which was more to blame while jostling for position to be the face of the Democrats going into 2016.
They are personified by former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, the presumptive presidential front-runner by virtue of her stature and fame, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the anti-Wall Street clarion favored by many on the left to challenge Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
A similar story played out in 2008 between then-Senator Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. You already know who won that battle. Hillary is a polarizing figure, even within the Democratic Party. She has a loyal following of backers but she also has some serious detractors, as noted by MoveOn.org’s decision to drop up to $1 million to draft Elizabeth Warren for 2016.