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Elizabeth Warren’s top media consultant isn’t ready for Warren

Mark Wilson/Getty Images
  1. Mandy Grunwald, who was the top paid media consultant for Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 campaign, is joining Hillary Clinton’s team.
  2. This is further evidence that Warren isn’t making moves towards running for president, and would have trouble mounting a viable alternative to Hillary Clinton’s campaign if she did.
  3. Grunwald also has a history with Clinton: she worked on Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, as well as her 2008 presidential campaign.

Warren isn’t laying the groundwork for a 2016 presidential campaign

An awful lot of people in progressive politics would like to see Elizabeth Warren run for president, but the latest sign that it’s not going to happen is a big one — Mandy Grunwald is joining Hillary Clinton’s team.

That’s not a shocking move. Grunwald worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign. So she’s a natural fit for Clinton.

But she was also the top paid media consultant for Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign. To take the leap from the Senate to the White House, you need to build on and expand your political team — not watch it shrink as key personnel drift off to other campaigns.

To be clear, this isn’t so much bad news for Warren — who has genuinely never given any indication that she’s wanted to challenge Clinton — as it is for the circle of people who’ve latched on Warren as the hypothetical Clinton-slayer of their dreams.

It shows that Warren is not laying the groundwork for a campaign, and that Clinton really and truly does have the Democratic Party’s top operatives lined up behind her.

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