Via the Free Beacon, you are not hallucinating. This actually happened.

In fact, that’s not the most surreal part. The surreal part is that this is obviously the answer John Hickenlooper should have given when he was recently asked whether he’s a capitalist and botched it royally. Read that again: A twice-elected governor from a swing state is less politically adept than Elizabeth Warren.

If I were him I’d drop out today in shame.

On Earth 2, Warren is being asked this same question amid news that Bernie Sanders has decided to pass on running for president again in 2020. How does she answer in that universe? Here on Earth 1 Warren is trying to straddle the two camps in the Democratic primary, progressives and neoliberals/centrists, mainly because she has no choice: Now that the country’s most famous socialist is in the race, it’d be pointless for her to try to run hard left. That’s Bernie’s lane. If she presents herself as a socialist too, she’ll gain little with all the tankies who view Sanders as the left’s true champion and she’ll lose some centrists who thought of her as less radical than Bernie. So instead she’s running as a progressive with lots of nice things to say about capitalism. Ask her about markets and she’ll bowl you over talking about how much she loves ’em — but week by week she’s touting big policy ideas, like reparations, that make the left happy. She’s trying to find the not-too-cold/not-too-hot “just right” spot in the field that can pull in progressives who, for whatever reason, are lukewarm about Bernie as well as neoliberals who, for whatever reason, are lukewarm about Biden. A populist whom both wings can admire, if not quite like.

Is that how she’s running on Earth 2, though, with the progressive vote wide open due to Sanders’s decision not to run? Or are she and Kamala Harris already furiously trying to out-left each other with zesty warnings about capitalism’s unsustainability? Whoever emerges from that fight had better bring their A-game if they plan on defeating Vice President Paul Ryan next year.

Anyway, she’s done.