The Iowa caucus has entered its home-stretch stage.  In less than two weeks, we'll know which Democratic candidate is leading the pack of lily-white hopefuls.

Prediction: Elizabeth Warren won't win Iowa.  She won't even finish as runner-up in any of the first four contests.

State-specific polls aren't auspicious for the soi-disant progressive senator.  Warren is currently fourth in Iowa and third in Nevada, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, the last being contiguous with the state she represents in the U.S. Senate.  Such standings make her the Marco Rubio of 2016 — all hype, no follow-through.

To pile more onto her troubles, there's no time to bridge her enthusiasm gap in Iowa.  Warren is waylaid in Washington for the useless jaw-jawing theater that's being called an impeachment trial.  Instead of assuring Iowa farmers she'll keep the commercial lines for soybeans open with Beijing, she's fussing over admissible witness testimony in front of C-SPAN cameras.  For the ill timed inconvenience, Warren can thank Nancy Pelosi's faffing around with the impeachment articles and waiting until just before the caucus to proffer them to Mitch McConnell.

With losing Iowa a foregone conclusion, the Warren solar-powered train has run out of sunlight and is slowly, if stubbornly, coming to a juddering halt.  But that isn't stopping the former Harvard professor from trying to cheat, throwing a jerrican of gas and a match into her struggling Stirling engine to give it a much needed boost.  To assist her duplicitous tactics, she has a queen's court of flacks and hacks to paper over her shortcomings.

The first of Warren's desperate attempts to buoy her sinking relevancy was her campaign almost certainly leaking an anecdote to CNN about Bernie Sanders attesting during a private colloquy that a woman couldn't win the White House.  Bernie denied the charge during the last presidential debate, only to have a moderator (again from CNN) suggest he was lying.  Then, sniffing blood, Warren, cannily aware that her mic was on and her words would be recorded and spread, went full Iago, feigning victimhood and claiming that Sanders lied about her.  The audio was released by CNN (surprise!) nearly 24 hours later to take advantage of the primetime news slot.

All in a day's work for a quickly capsizing campaign!  The entire production was a not so subtle exercise in checkbook journalism, with Jeff Zucker making an in-kind payment to Warren 2020.

But even that vulpine stunt failed to deter the target.  So Warren's dropped her easygoing conciliator persona and started to openly criticize her other opponents, not without tripping on her own record.  She claimed to be the only candidate with executive experience, somehow forgetting that she's competing with the former vice president of the United States.  She reproved Mayor Pete Buttigieg for attending a fundraiser in a wine cave that offers $900 bottles of cab sav, only to have her own rattling of the tin can at vinous fêtes dredged up.

Even on her signature issue — putting the industrious pension sponges at the Post Office in charge of the national provision of health care — Warren compromised, dropping immediate socialization in favor of slow-walking Medicare for All.  She still can't get the new entitlement's price tag right.

In all this, Warren has revealed herself to be a catchpenny version of Bernie — not as pure as Siberian snow, but not a Morgan Stanley shill, either.  In tottering between socialist and center-left, Warren hacked both sides of the base off.  She now trails Bernie and Biden by double digits. 

Warren squandered her coalitional potential in spite of her political promise as a wonkier, less dissolute version of Hillary Clinton.  But Democratic voters wanted something more than a former corporate lawyer in a cardigan and crew-neck shirt who drinks beer like a robot learning human customs.  Unlucky for them, they ended up with a choice between two old men with wrinkles thick enough to be dendrochronologically dated.

The typical Democratic primary voter will never admit this, but Warren's biggest electoral drag is her finger-wagging personality.  As Michael Warren Davis puts it, "the problem with Mrs. Warren is that she's a professional scold.  She's the very avatar of a screechy, preachy schoolmarm."  It's why the senator's favorability has tanked among men.  The less fair sex don't like being reminded of their stern, martinet-esque elementary-school teachers.  For half the U.S. population, Warren symbolizes the priggish pedagogue who called their mothers about a poor math test score or a blacktop tussle.

Expect Warren to exit the race not long after Super Tuesday, after Biden and Bernie split the delegate spoils.  Warren will then trudge back to the Senate, with the unfortunate knowledge that her time was in 2016, not 2020.

Image: Edward Kimmel via Flickr.