Reason Why Hillary Clinton is not Picking Elizabeth Warren for Vice President

The Boston Globe is reporting today that Hillary Clinton will consider putting another woman on the ticket as her vice presidential nominee this fall.

The first name on almost every Democrat's lips is Elizabeth Warren, the freshman Massachusetts senator who is beloved among liberals and regarded as the animating force behind the grass-roots energy that has propelled Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign against Clinton. Writes the Globe's Annie Linskey:

Warren is one of the few Democratic women with national name recognition and a big following among progressives, a voting bloc Sanders has energized. Having Warren on the ticket could help Clinton stitch the party back together after a divisive primary.

True. And also true that Democrats have surprisingly few women prominent enough nationally for Clinton to seriously consider them for the national ticket. Aside from Warren, the names you regularly hear are Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.). The Globe's James Pindell floats Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) and former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, as well.

Warren is clearly a first among equals in that group both for her fundraising prowess and her status as an icon of the liberal left.  But, my strong sense is that Clinton and her inner circle will pick Warren only as a sort of last resort.

Here's why. Warren hasn't endorsed Clinton in the presidential race, the only female Democratic senator in that position. “What I’m glad to see is what’s happening right now, and that is that the Democrats are out talking about the issues,” Warren said in an interview with CBS in mid-March. “I think it makes it very distinct what happens between our side and what’s happening over on the other side. They’re doing some kind of reality show, we’re out here trying to talk about the issues that affect the American people.”

And, not only has Warren not embraced Clinton, she has been a thorn in the front-runner's side for much of the 2016 race. Her allegations that campaign contributions from the banking industry changed Clinton's mind about the need to overhaul bankruptcy laws became a talking point for Sanders during a debate earlier this year.

What's been made obvious during the course of the Clinton-Sanders primary fight is that the electorate is split into Democrats who believe Wall Street needs to be closely watched and regulated but is not fundamentally evil and Democrats who believe Wall Street is corrupt through and through and must be treated as such.  Clinton is on one side of this divide, Sanders and Warren are on the other. This passage, taken from Ryan Lizza's terrific May 2015 profile of Warren in the New Yorker, is telling:

As Lizza goes on to report, Clinton allies believe Warren's views on the economy — and the real root causes of wage stagnation and income inequality — are overly simplistic and reflect a lack of deep understanding of how the world actually works. "The challenge of wage stagnation is that it’s happening in large swaths of the economy, many parts of which are relatively untouched by the influence of the banks,” one Clinton adviser told Lizza.