Liberal activists are slamming Hillary Clinton in a members-only group on Google, with some calling for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run for the White House in 2016 to teach the former secretary of State and mainstream Democrats a lesson.
"The establishment Dems need to be punished, and the best way for that to happen is for Warren to beat Hillary in the primary on a populist message," Carl Gibson, a progressive activist and writer for Occupy.com, wrote in an email obtained by
The Hill.
Warren, 65, who is in her first term, has repeatedly said that she would not seek the presidency in 2016. Clinton, 66, who is seen as the likely Democratic nominee, has said that
she will decide early next year on whether to run.
The Hill said it reviewed "hundreds of emails" from a the "Gamechanger Salon," a private, members only forum through which nearly 1,500 progressive activists, journalists, and strategists discuss issues and develop messaging efforts.
The group is run by Billy Wimsatt, founder of the progressive League of Young Voters, according to
MediaTrackers.org, which first reported on the Gamechanger Salon earlier this year.
Its members include prominent Democrats, executives of such powerful unions as the SEIU and AFL-CIO, and officials and members of such organizations as Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
The president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Nancy Keenan, is a member — as well as journalists who work for such liberal news organizations as The Nation magazine and The Huffington Post.
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New members to the group have to be sponsored by a current member, both the Hill and MediaTrackers report.
According to the Hill, the emails it reviewed from June 2013 through July show a clear dissatisfaction with Clinton.
"[A] Clinton presidency undos [sic] all our progress and returns the financial interests to even more prominence than they currently have," Melissa Byrne, an activist with the Occupy Wall Street movement, said in a November 2013 email.
The newspaper talked with a half-dozen Gamechanger Salon members this week, learning that the frustration with Clinton has only grown since it last read some of the emails.
"There’s good reason to believe the discontent remains the same," said Neil Sroka, spokesman for Democracy for America.
Generally speaking, the emails slam Clinton as "too much of a hawk, too cozy with Wall Street" — and that she "hasn’t spoken out enough on climate change, and will be subject to personal questions and criticisms," the Hill reports.
But group members seem to be most upset with Clinton's vote for the Iraq War in 2002 when she was a New York senator.
She has since said that her vote was a mistake.
"The more progressives I talk to, the more people tell me that they’ll never forgive her for voting for the Iraq War ... and won’t even vote for her in the general," Ryan Clayton, a progressive commentator and strategist, said in a July 2013 email.
Charles Lenchner, executive director of the progressive group Organizing 2.0, told the Hill that Clinton — and anyone else who backed the war — was "tainted."
"And personally, I would like to see a Democratic Party where folks who enabled George Bush to drag the country into a permanent war are punished at the ballot box," Lenchner said in an interview.
A Clinton spokesman declined to comment to the Hill.
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