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Try as they might, reporters and liberal critics can't quite get Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to go all in and criticize President Obama. In a new interview over atSalon, Thomas Frank lays out all of the complaints of disappointed Democrats, but Warren doesn't exactly bite:

FRANK: In some ways thats exactly the problem. When I talk to people, they often say Democrats aren't the party of working people at all. And they talk about NAFTA and deregulating Wall Street, and they say, look at these guys, they wont prosecute the financial industry. They say, Democrats talk a good game, but theyre always on the side of the elite at the end of the day. What do you say to these people?

WARREN: Were the only ones fighting back. Right now, on financial reform, the Republicans are trying to roll back the financial reforms of Dodd-Frank. In fact, Mitch McConnell has announced that if he gets the majority in the Senate, his first objective is to repeal healthcare and his second is to roll back the financial reforms, and in particular to target the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau the one agency thats out there for American families, the one that has returned more than four billion dollars to families who got cheated by big financial institutions. Thats in just three years.

There was also this exchange, which again lays out the disappointment something of a longing on the part of disaffected liberals to have someone of Warren's stature validate their frustration (emphasis ours):

FRANK: Heres the penultimate question: everything youre saying are issues that have been important to me most of my adult life. In 2008, I thought I had a candidate who was going to address these things. Right? Barack Obama. Today, my friends and I are pretty disappointed with what hes done. I wonder if you feel he has been forthright enough on these subjects. And I also wonder if you think that someone can take any of this stuff on without being president. You know, there are a lot of good politicians in America who have their heart in the right place. But theyre not the president. Well anyhow. You understand my frustration

WARREN: I understand your frustration, Tom and, actually, I talk about this in the book. When I think about the president, for me, its about both halves. If Barack Obama had not been president of the United States we would not have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Period. Im completely convinced of that. And I go through the details in the book, and I could tell them to you. But he was the one who refused to throw the agency under the bus and made sure that his team kept the agency alive and on the table. Now there was a lot of other stuff that also had to happen for it to happen. But if he hadnt been there, we wouldnt have gotten the agency. At the same time, he picked his economic team and when the going got tough, his economic team picked Wall Street.

FRANK: You might say, always. Just about every time they had to compromise, they compromised in the direction of Wall Street.

WARREN: Thats right. They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. Not young people who were struggling to get an education. And it happened over and over and over. So I see both of those things and they both matter.

This is the harshest criticism could muster, and it's not exactly new. In fact, the original criticism of Obama's financial team when he picked them was that they were Clinton retreads, collected fat Wall Street paychecks and favored deregulation. Obama, in Warren's view, picked the wrong economic team, and they wound up pickingWall Street. Again, this isn't a new assessment of Obama, nor is it the kind of barn-burner denunciationsome liberals are apparently pining for.

Partly, it's because it wouldn't do Warren and her fellow Democrats any good to criticize the party and the president in a tough midtermyear. But Warrenhas shown plenty of reticence to criticize any of her fellow Democrats -- including Hillary Clinton.

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The Fix: Sorry, liberals. Elizabeth Warren still wont really criticize Obama or Clinton.