He's running!

Last week the New York Times gave us one of those obligatory "Democratic Donor Class Is Panicked" articles that start coming out every quarter or so once we reach this stage of the Presidential pre-primary. Oh no are the candidates "too far to the left"?  Why haven't the piggies begun to rally around Amy Klobuchar's stern lectures about what they can't have yet?  Somebody has to do something about this. Who could we call on?

Would Hillary Clinton get in, the contributors wondered, and how about Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor? One person even mused whether Michelle Obama would consider a late entry, according to two people who attended the event, which was hosted by the progressive group American Bridge.

Hey you know that might work. Uncle Joe's exploding eyeballs may have embarrassed the hell out of everyone by yelling at Warren on stage last week.  But here is Hillary with her idea to yell at a completely different person instead.  Should they give that a go?   Maybe.

But hey, look who else appears in this article for some reason.

“I can see it, I can feel it, I can hear it,” Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor, said of the unease within the party. He said he thinks Mr. Biden is best positioned to defeat Mr. Trump but called the former vice president’s fund-raising “a real concern.”

It's a "real concern," but like a lot of these establishment Democrats, Mitch is still a Bidenite. Or, at least, he is until he is given permission not to be anymore.  When Joe finally accedes to the concerns of his fundraisers and drops out of the race, all of the career supplicants backing him out of obligation will be free to adopt whatever the next company line might be.

The early odds may have had them all landing on Kamala. But, more recently, one could argue they may cynically gravitate toward Warren.  Right now that seems like a logical evolution of the evergreen strategy of co-opting and crowding out the left. See this excellent analysis by Matt Karp for more on that.

Yet while she is sometimes described as an “economic populist,” Warren’s chief function in the primary race against Bernie Sanders has been to take the populism out of progressive economics. While formally embracing much of Sanders’s 2016 platform, the Warren campaign distinguished itself not by underlining the necessity of popular struggle, but by advertising the comprehensive wonkery of her policy agenda: “She has a plan for that!” Warren’s planfulness is Democratic savior politics in the style of Obama or Hillary Clinton. It does not summon the will of the masses; it says, “Chill out, she’s got this.”

The emphasis here is on the reasonableness of the plans, not the boldness of the demands. Even Warren’s most daring stroke on this front, a 2 percent tax on fortunes over $50 million, elicits chants of “two cents, two cents!” — with the campaign and its supporters alike practically fetishizing the modest limits of the request.

When Warren does vow to challenge the power the wealthy, her rhetoric often works not to stoke the popular mind against America’s inequality but to naturalize it as a fact of national life: “In America, there are gonna be people who are richer and people who are not so rich. And the rich are gonna own more shoes, and they’re gonna own more cars, and they may even own more houses. But they shouldn’t own more of our democracy.”

This isn’t economic populism; it’s closer to a folksy progressive riff on “there is no alternative.” Nor does such a cabined understanding of “democracy” — a question of fair procedures, walled off from the world of material goods — open much room for questioning the tyranny of bosses under capitalism.

Speaking of never questioning the tyranny of bosses, the New Orleans Times-Picayune-Dot-Nola-Dot-Com-Georges-Advoco-Gambit tells us that Mitch Landrieu is back in town to "formally launch" the same foundation he already formally launched a year ago.

Landrieu will formally launch the E Pluribus Unum initiative on Friday, an effort with influential backers including former President Bill Clinton that seeks to reshape the country's conversation about race. The goal, he says, is to more effectively reach out and help people gain a better understanding of racism in modern America.

The message is geared mainly toward the white community.

Mitch has been running around the country meeting with Lauren Powell Jobs, with Bill Clinton, with scores of corporate donors to see how much money he can pile up in the name of talking to white people about racism. That can't possibly mean he's even remotely within the universe of potential emergency Presidential candidates Democratic donors are supposed to be casting about for at the moment. Right?  Well just to be sure let's ask.

With years of work ahead to make a go of his new foundation, Landrieu brushed away suggestions that he might be seeking a position in the administration of any of the presidential contenders, using similar language to the incalculable times he was asked whether he had aspirations for the Oval Office.

“I don’t have any expectations of being in the next president’s cabinet,” he said.

Pretty cryptic! Maybe he's still waiting on the right call.  On the other hand, if Karp is correct about corporate Democrats warming up to an accommodation with Warren, it would mean that the Biden-Harris-Hillary-Mitch mode of centrist campaigning is no longer the new hotness.  But old habits die hard. Let's see how they feel after the convention.