I wanted to post some thoughts on the next primary season, well before the stakes get high, and well after tempers have cooled from the last wide-open democratic primaries.
First of all, before I get to likely future candidates, let me say one thing about the last round in 2008 here on dkos: I was really bothered by the gaming of the reclist with Edwards diaries. There were days when 7 of the 10 diaries on the reclist were Edwards diaries, and polls of dkos users did not show anything close to 70% support for Edwards. There was large support for Obama, almost as large support for Hillary, Edwards was a (pretty distant) third, and then somewhere down the list was Biden et al.
While I'm on the subject of Edwards, let me say this: long before the revelations of infidelity, my overwhelming sense of Edwards was that he was a preening phony. The 2004 vice-presidential debates sealed that impression, but even before then, there was something about him that just made my skin crawl. I will further postulate that I probably wasn't the only person here that had that reaction to him - which makes the efforts to portray him as The Candidate Whose Time Has Come that much more disturbing.
For 2016 I would like to suggest a rule: only two diaries supporting or discussing each individual candidate can be on the reclist at a time, and the same rule would apply to the community spotlight. So there would be, say, 2 Biden Diaries, two Hillary diaries, 2 Warren (please God...) diaries, and so on. I'm not sure how this could be implemented on the technical level, but it should not be that difficult a problem.
That aside, here are some general thoughts on who's in, who's likely to be in, and how they stack up.
Hillary Clinton: Clinton is the consensus choice of the Democratic Party establishment, and the Clinton Machine would be a formidable opponent to any Republican nominee, if she prevailed in the primary season.
Strengths: She would be a formidable opponent to any Republican nominee. Also, the first woman president would be an important milestone that would have a "coat-tails" effect for women throughout society - it would make being corporate CEOs and University presidents that much more open to women.
Weaknesses: She is not, and has not been, a friend of progressives in either foreign policy or economics. She supported the Iraq War, and there is very little daylight on economic and labor issues between her and her (NAFTA-supporting, welfare-ending) husband. She would represent no substantive danger to entrenched Wall Street interests, and is not showing encouraging signs that she will do much to address the pressing issue of income and wealth inequality. She's a DLC-oriented Dem who would basically provide further assistance to the right in pulling the Overton Window rightward. She's Wall Street's favorite Democrat.
More fundamentally, she's not much of a political risk-taker. What I mean by that is she is unlikely to forge ahead of public opinion on any issue, and then use persuasion to catch the citizenry up to her. She is a politician in the worst sense of that word, far too beholden to the whims of public opinion than to any particular political principle or premise. I think she is the answer if the year is 1992 - "Do anything - just get a Democrat in the oval office!" But in the present moment we need someone who will be reliably progressive where it counts - on issues of economic fairness. Hillary is not that candidate.
Joe Biden: He'll probably run, since it is more or less a tradition for the VP of a two-term president to run.
Strengths: He's a known quantity. I can't think of anything to preclude him from consideration in 2016.
Weaknesses: He's a known quantity. I can't think of a compelling reason to get behind him in 2016.
Elizabeth Warren: Policy-wise, she is The Dream Candidate of just about every progressive I know, or know of. A successful Warren presidential campaign would be the End Of The World for the titans of Wall Street. She has indicated pretty conclusively that she is not running in 2016, but she might be persuaded to change her mind if there were a groundswell of support for her.
Strengths: A Warren Presidency would be the apocalypse for the still-far-too-dominant Rentier Class on Wall Street, who are, in the words of Mick Jagger, "...in need of some restraint." On economic issues, she would likely be the most progressive president since FDR.
More than that, she would shake up politics in a pretty profound way in this country.
Someone once asked Sherrod Brown, the Democratic Senator from Ohio, why blue-collar folks people in southeastern Ohio had been voting for Republicans. His answer: "Because the Democrats stopped talking to them."
Bingo.
Jere's Thomas Frank, author (most recently) of Pity the Billionnaire:
[T]he Republican Party just finished [this is from January 2012] bouncing back in the most amazing way. The GOP took a terrible beating back in 2006 and '08; every commentator said the party had to moderate itself and move to the center. But they did exactly the opposite, and then they won their greatest Congressional victory in decades. Today they are moving further to the right all the time, and they are taking a huge part of this country with them. Until liberals figure out how to do what their ancestors did--speak convincingly to a nation enduring terrible hard times--this is going to continue.
I think Elizabeth Warren has the potential to be that "convincing" voice.