How Elizabeth Warren is defining the presidential race
In the middle of the volatile fall of 2008, with foreclosures skyrocketing and companies failing and unemployment spiking and the stock market sinking, 80 rattled first-semester Harvard Law School students stood outside a classroom and watched the Dow plummet yet again. Then they stepped inside and took their seats for their contracts course with professor Elizabeth Warren.
“And professor Warren’s like, ‘We’re actually not going to talk about contracts,’” former student Danielle D’Onfro told me. “‘We’re going to talk about what’s happening in the world.’”
Warren ditched the syllabus and instead gave a lecture on the cratering economy and its causes, encapsulating the collapse as she understood it. In interviews over the past couple weeks, her former students described it as “riveting” and “engaging” and “eye-opening.”
“She basically proceeded to explain the financial crisis as it was happening,” Nigel Barrella said. “It was pretty amazing—at a time when no one else, really, seemed to have answers like that—that she would come in and talk about credit default swaps and collateralized mortgages, junk mortgages, carved up into tranches, and sold to financial institutions as high-quality financial products.”
Her impromptu primer on the crisis spanned two days, November 12 and 13, according to the calendar of one of her students, and their takeaway was twofold: (1) Professor Warren sure had a knack for talking about this stuff, and (2) this skill might take her somewhere beyond even the august confines of HLS.
“I think for all of us sitting there at that moment,” D’Onfro said, “we realized that, you know, this person is not just going to be our contracts professor.”
They were right. Warren’s gift for explication has led her almost inexorably from there to here—from explaining at Harvard, in classes, in a reading group, on a blog and on panels of academics and in the popular press, to explaining in Washington, where she came to prominence as a piercing watchdog before she was elected to the Senate. And on a historically crowded presidential campaign trail, she has steadily distanced herself from most of the field with her grasp of detail and capacity to break it down, standing as the top-polling Democrat not named Joe Biden heading into this week’s curtain-raising debates.
Warren’s professorial background, and her history as a Washington player on an issue as complex as financial regulation, has led some political observers to ask of late whether this particular gift could be a mixed blessing—a talent that also defines her ceiling, especially with the working-class voters who could make the difference in a presidential election.
“She’s lecturing,” David Axelrod, the top Barack Obama strategist, recently said of Warren in the New York Times Magazine, wondering how that approach would play with non-college-educated white voters. (“I regretted that the rest of my thoughts were excised,” he told me in a subsequent conversation, saying Warren has “phenomenal strengths.” But still: “I think this is the last big hurdle for her,” he said.)
He’s not the only one who’s considered this. “It’s a fascinating question,” former Jeb Bush senior adviser Michael Steel told me. He called it “a huge challenge … figuring out how to explain her policy positions, the problems they purport to address, and how it fits in with her theory, in a way that somebody sitting on a stool in a Waffle House will understand and agree with.”
Others, though, push back on just the basic terms of this conversation. Progressive consultant Rebecca Katz said in an email, “Let’s call the attack on her ‘lecturing’ what it really is: sexist.” Added Boston-based political analyst Mary Anne Marsh: “She’s been defining this race.” [Continue reading…]
Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders top a new straw poll from progressive group MoveOn.org, illuminating how the packed field of candidates is coming into focus for more left-leaning Democratic voters just before the first debate of the 2020 cycle.
The poll, being released Tuesday and which NBC News is the first to report, shows Warren is the first choice of 38 percent of MoveOn’s members nationwide — and she also comes in on top in each of the states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and California.
Sanders comes in second — 17 percent say he’s their first choice — trailing Warren by more than 20 points. Former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg are the only other candidates to earn double-digit support, and California Sen. Kamala Harris comes in with 7 percent support. [Continue reading…]
Meanwhile, Vox reports that Joe Biden is spending more time chasing money than votes:
Over seared ahi tuna, langoustine tail, cocktails, and caviar, in settings ranging from the home of a former Boston Red Sox CEO, to a Las Vegas casino, to the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, Joe Biden’s donors have been listening to the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination explain that everyday people feel left behind.
The former vice president has been talking to rich people about income inequality a lot lately. [Continue reading…]