Hillary held private dinner with Elizabeth Warren in December

Want to know why Elizabeth Warren keeps vehemently denying her desire to launch a 2016 presidential campaign and challenge Hillary Clinton? I think the answer is coming into focus. Back in December of 2014, Hillary invited Warren to a private, closed-door dinner to build a working relationship with the Massachusetts senator. Despite being well-known in political circles, neither Hillary nor Warren have crossed paths up until now making this dinner all that more intriguing.

Report from Boston.com:

A short two-mile drive northwest from the White House—encircled by the embassies of the United Kingdom, Bolivia, Brazil, Italy, Denmark, and New Zealand—Hillary Clinton invited Senator Elizabeth Warren to her home for a private, one-on-one meeting in December, reported the New York Times on Tuesday.

Clinton, who has all but announced her 2016 presidential candidacy, met with the Massachusetts senator at her brick, colonial-style home in Washington in an effort to “cultivate the increasingly influential senator and leader of the party’s economic populist movement,” according to the Times.

Clinton did not ask for an endorsement from Warren, but instead “solicited policy ideas and suggestions.” Though the two met without aides, the Times reported a Democrat briefed on the meeting called it “cordial and productive.”

Though the former secretary of state, U.S senator and First Lady is the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, many progressives have clamored for Warren to throw her hat in the 2016 ring, viewing Clinton as too hawkish on foreign policy and cosy with Wall Street.

Keep your friends close, and your potential political enemies closer. As the Times story noted, Hillary would rather have Warren coming to her personally on issues than badgering her on primetime cable news every night if their opinions differ on various policies.

In fact, I’d go a step further and perhaps suggest that Warren may have been promised a role in Hillary’s administration should she win the presidency in exchange for a cooperative relationship. There’s no proof of that, but these types of deals are commonplace in the world of presidential politics.