Top of the ticket to ya, Sen. Warren

So how's the 2016 presidential race shaping up? I'd put my money on Warren-Clinton.

You read that right: Warren-Clinton. Clinton-Warren is not my dream ticket.

Step back and hear me out. Politics, as everyone knows, is a money game. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts, has built up considerable street cred (not the Wall Street kind) since she decided to make life miserable for the banking industry because no one else would. Word got around that this little lady might make a big difference.

Stories about Warren's latest dust-up with the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Goldman Sachs became a regular feature in the business pages of the New York Times. Warren knew her stuff, the pundits said. She did not take no for an answer. She seemed immune to the kind of male-chauvinist skulduggery that quashed the efforts of Brooksley Born, former chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to regulate the derivatives market and thus stave off the second worst financial crisis in U.S. history.

If Warren wasn't able to stop her Senate colleagues from gutting Dodd-Frank (the bill written to control the risky derivatives trading and other practices that had contributed to the 2008 mortgage crisis), at least she might salvage enough of it to protect U.S. taxpayers in the event of an even more frightening financial collapse.

Warren's latest tussle involves a bipartisan effort to require corporations that settle cases with the Securities and Exchange Comission to publicly disclose the details — not just the money part but the malfeasance itself. The 11th-hour challenge that scuttled this so-called Truth in Settlements Act last year was eventually linked to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful business lobby group. Warren noted that "[t]he Chamber's position boils down to this: Let's keep the details of these agreements hidden from view so that corporate wrongdoers don't have to worry about any real accountability for their illegal actions. That sounds great if you are a big company that breaks the law, but I don't think it sounds great to the American people."

Photos of "the fiery Sen. Warren" show a slender, middle-aged woman with short gray-blond hair, wire-rimmed glasses and nice teeth. She might have grown up in Minnesota. In fact, she is a dead ringer for one in five Edina residents' fourth-grade teachers. Remember Mrs. Johnson, who always put a smiley face next to your grade?

Unlike our current president, Warren has plenty of experience playing hardball on behalf of the average American. She's 65 years old. Her youthful appearance is one reason why she should be at the top of a Warren-Clinton ticket. Looks matter. I have no idea if Warren lifts weights or runs marathons, but Hillary Clinton, while remarkably well-preserved for a woman pushing the big 7-0, looks exhausted.

And besides, Clinton had her chance six years ago, a chance she blew when Barack Obama made her cry on national TV.

Call me coldhearted, but I soured on Mrs. Clinton long before she showed she had feelings. The honeymoon was over for me when she flouted custom and joined her husband's inner circle of White House policy advisers. She was apparently not content to be the kind of low-profile sounding board that Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan had been for their spouses. Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't shy about sharing her opinions with FDR, but she never presented herself publicly as an adjunct Cabinet member.

I was amazed at the public's nonresponse when President Bill Clinton named his wife the nation's first health care czar. The job wasn't in the party platform. It didn't show up in any of her husband's stump speeches. Nor did Mrs. Clinton's knowledge of health care run deep. A quick study, she picked up just enough to run more savvy reformers' hopes off a cliff.

Hillary seemed to have made a devil's bargain with Bill: I'll keep quiet about Gennifer Flowers (and all the others) if you remember that your wife has worked just as hard as you have to further your career. It's payback time.

She was idolized overseas. I remember dining at a Paris restaurant during the height of the impeachment ordeal. A stylish sixty-something couple (she was his mistress) seated next to me found out that I was American and proceeded to wax rhapsodic about "your wonderful first lady" while heaping contempt on Americans' hypocrisy in matters of love.

I have no quarrel with a woman who chooses to stay married to a philandering husband. What really bothers me is the way Clinton abandoned her political principles in order to stay in the game. After Bill left office, she chose to represent a state she'd never lived in and ran a hawkish, pro-business campaign.

I support Warren for president because — let's face it — Clinton has baggage. Does anyone even know what Warren's husband looks like?

Clinton wasn't wrong to believe our health care system sucked. She was wrong to believe she could craft an alternative including for-profit insurers that would also be efficient and fair. Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, whom FDR himself described as his conscience and goad, Clinton uttered not a word of protest against her husband's abrupt rightward shift midway through his first term. She then capitalized on it when she needed Wall Street's approval in her run for Senate. NAFTA and other trade agreements that sacrificed millions of American manufacturing jobs are as much her legacy as his. So is the now-infamous decision to dismantle Roosevelt-era curbs on banking, including Glass-Steagall, the regulation prohibiting big commercial banks like Wells Fargo from operating like investment banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, to name two of the most notorious, thus setting in motion the mortgage crisis.

It was also on the Clintons' watch that auto and oil companies persuaded Congress that precious jobs would be lost if light trucks were not excluded from stringent fuel-efficiency (CAFE) standards passed in 1975. Enter the era of the gas-guzzling SUV. The 1995 exemption came up again five years later. Buoyed by a close vote in the Republican-held Senate, environmentalists asked the president for a veto. They didn't get it.

Warren is willing to veto the Keystone pipeline because … it's the planet, stupid.

"We are on the cusp of a climate crisis — a point of no return that will threaten our health, our economy, and our world," she wrote to members of the League of Conservation Voters. "But we are also at a moment of great opportunity, where investment, smart regulations, and real commitment could move us boldly into the future. Over the next ten years, oil and gas companies will suck down $40 billion in taxpayer subsidies. We know they're going to fight tooth and nail to protect — or even expand — those special breaks."

Warren is willing to take positions that Obama apparently couldn't because he was the first black president. She barely seems aware of her gender difference, much less that she has a shot — albeit long — at becoming the first woman president. She's too busy exposing unfair subsidies, demanding corporate transparency and beefing up Dodd-Frank.

What else would a President Warren do? She would tell working people why the wealth gap is killing the American dream. She would tell them that companies like Medtronic and Walgreens are giving up their U.S. citizenship because, after all, these days they have customers and workers aplenty overseas and evading the IRS is way too much trouble. It's cheaper to just move. New NAFTA-style trade agreements like the Transpacific Partnership wouldn't be hush-hush with Warren in the White House. Neither would drone attacks, CIA surveillance techniques, and sweetheart deals between corporations and the Justice Department.

Could candidate Warren be bought? That's always possible, but one thing I'm sure of is that Hillary Clinton sold out a long time ago. Which isn't to say she wouldn't make a superb vice president.

President Clinton wasn't perfect, but he was born for the job he won not once but twice (yes, with a lot of help from his capable wife). Had he not been so viciously set upon by his political foes, he would have taken his liberal plans to the people instead of attempting to compromise with Congress and giving up far more than he'd ever bargained for in the process. President Obama made the same mistake. I'm hoping President Warren would not.

With Hillary Clinton by her side, she would have a far better chance not only of winning, thanks to the former first lady's name recognition and experience, but also of merging the interests of working Americans who have lost faith in both the left and the right after having been whipsawed back and forth between them because no liberal leader since FDR has figured out what exactly those interests are and how to explain them and deliver the goods.

This is a tall order. Sometimes it takes a crystal ball to know what's best for people.

I was as confused during the Clinton years as anyone and thought a global economy might indeed lead to world peace. Hindsight is 20-20, it's true. But maybe with Warren as her teacher, Hillary the quick study could get over her infatuation with corporate power and elitist brain trusts like disgraced Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin — the architect, along with Alan Greenspan, of "too big to fail" — and see the people the way her husband did.

Maybe she could help Warren have it both ways by bringing some of those corporations into the Warren-Clinton camp, too. Or, at the very least, bringing money that an obscure progressive like Warren would surely have no hope of securing.

The money boys know all that. They know they owe the former first lady, and that she isn't one to forgive a debt.