I was one of the crowd at yesterday’s JP listening even for not-quite-Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. I went in agreeing to a request from Reuben Kantor not to record her or report on the even with quotes. Today, Kyle Sullivan, her communications guy, said to do it. Here’s a cross-post from Marry in Massachusetts.
As insubstantial as Elizabeth Warren is physically, she is a monster in intellect, insight and rhetoric. With the help of a serious team — Doug Rubin and Kyle Sullivan, who wrote the lyrics and choreographed the moves that gave us Gov. Deval Patrick — and the sudden splash of an exploratory committee, she is a click away from running for U.S. Senator from MA next year.
Reuben Kantor helped with the JP meet and greet, but is not an advisor.
After sitting a few feet away as she worked the 70 or so of us last evening, I went in dubious and came out impressed. Despite last night’s cost of admission to the event (no quotes), I got Sullivan’s blessing by cell this afternoon to write what I want. That’s a relief, as I have some index cards here that need transcription. I regret not turning on the digital recorder, so you could get more than a small taste.
She’s hot stuff. She’s real. She’s earthy, most particularly rare for a Harvard faculty member. Her entry into this race for the seat that Scott Brown is warming might raise the level of discussion an order of magnitude. For all his clichés and bobble-headed sappiness, Brown is not stupid, but I’d bet she has 30 IQ points on his…and more important, an abiding understanding of and respect for the middle and lower classes.
So,what you might ask was it like to sit in a room overflowing with JP pinkos and progressives with Warren?
Inconsequential disclaimers: I found myself identifying with her more than I expected. I’m a year and a couple of days order than she. We’re both long-term Boston-area residents, who were born in Oklahoma — always a conversation stopper around here. She’s Southern enough to have good manners (and to expect good manners) and yet be plain spoken. It must have been a terrific surprise to her, as shown in the video, when ethically dim Republicans called her a liar. I bet she is incapable of deceit.
Talented orator
From my hour with her, I think Warren’s only delusion is that she is loud. She did the school-teacher thing and pulled the audience in toward her feet in the living room, with the dining room peeking in and a few hallway and front porch lurkers. She has a nice, rotund delivery, but is no stentor.
Yet her ideas and passions are so powerful that she seems much larger than her voice or body. she is not big and does not dress big, not like a business slut or lawyer set to impress with tailoring. Instead, she was like an updated beatnik, in black trousers and top, with a long, open, tan cardigan sort of duster thingummy. The effect was judge what I say, not what I wear.
Indeed what she said was powerful. She had been to two or three of these staged listening events (which were a lot more audience listening to her than she to them) already yesterday. She was not tired though.
She started with bio slivers considerably more evocative and powerful than Brown’s immaculate barn coat or spotless pickup bought to lug around hay for his privileged daughter’s pony. She was a hick from poor stock in our mutual birth state. She had a magnificent grandma tale of widowed great granddad on a horse headed out in the Sooner land rush to an arable plot, while her grandmother drove a wagon of household goods and siblings behind. That was not a trust-fund history, but the authentic American pioneer story.
She still could smile as she recounted growing up “on the ragged edge of the middle class.” She remembers her mother weighing how sick the child or children really were against whether they had been able to pay the doctor anything on their bill to justify a visit. She remembers being delighted at 9 to earn 35¢ an hour babysitting a terribly colicky baby and relieving small bit of strain on the family. She is well aware of how important it was to be the first in her family to get a college education and feels deeply grateful for state colleges that let students work their way through to such accomplishment.
She married at 19, had her first child, Amelia, at 22, and threw herself into potty training so she could attend Rutgers Law with a little one. All of these elements live through her understanding of and compassion for ordinary people’s challenges to survive and thrive. Much of her academic and financial research at the university and federal level reflects these realities of the masses. In fact, the drive to create the Consumer Financial Protect Bureau over the howls and bricks of the many in Congress and lobbyists who don’t know or don’t care about plain folk has been quite a shock down on the Potomac.
Bankers or families
In that sense, Warren displayed her amazing populism in that hour in JP. She described our terrifying recession as “a crisis of one family at a time and one lousy mortgage at a time.”
Therein appeared the theme of the evening. Not only did she see the problem clearly, she was enough of a scholar to come in with solution(s). Unlike not only Brown, but most in both the Senate and House, Warren wants to understand both the problem and the solution.
In the case of the current economic morass, she pointed to the real national lesson from the Great Depression. That is, “Write a good set of rules.” Then, as with the FDR administration forward, we got 50 years to apply those rules, revitalize the middle class, and get America working.
That’s one aspect of her consumer bureau work in D.C. She saw the need for very specific good rules for credit cards, mortgages and such. Even when she learned that many in and around Congress wanted to smother her effort and have her crawl away, she knew her job wasn’t complete. She gave great credit to President Barack Obama for saying and continuing to say he’d veto any effort to neuter her bureau. Instead of being frightened when lobbyists and House members who favored banks attacked her, Warren got country, thinking, “Don’t leave your game in the locker room.” With the POTUS’ support, she did not get to head the bureau, but she got the bureau up and running.
She came away a bit bruised, realizing, “They can vote for the banks or they can for for families.” I am sure if she runs, we’ll hear that more than once, and we can look to the voting record of Brown and others on middle-class economic issues.
To the wolves
The JP audience was with her on her problem definitions and solutions. They alternately were fawning and a few angry, but not at her. Some expressed now stereotypical progressive exasperation at Obama specifically and Democrats more generally, with their seeming eagerness to lay waste to many decades of social safety net components, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. I share that frustration and think of the Dem reaction like the melodrama of the Russians in the troika tossing animals and then kids off to placate the pack of chasing wolves.
Asked a few ways if she’d run against Brown, Warren did no quite say, “Yes.” Instead, she started with, “I can only do this if it’s a grass roots movement.” (I note with mild amusement that ads pop up on BlueMassGroup and my own blog here to draft her.) She added that when she and Rubin spoke of the possibility of a run he told her, “If you’ll do this, I’ll help you.”
That sent her into grandmotherly paroxysms. She was genuinely endearing as she went into a rapture of her nine-month-old grandson, Atticus. “He’s delicious,” she said, smiling broadly enough to crinkle her eyes and displace her glasses. “The hardest thing when I’m with him is not to eat his toes off.” As a dad of three, I recall the amazing glories of and wonderment at my sons’ tiny fingers and toes, and that was before they had even begun to show their wit.
She used her grandchildren as a segue to wondering aloud whether we were headed for an America where they would have diminished opportunities as a result of our government’s decisions and policies. Here, she only hinted at what seemed to be the clearest campaign issue, and pointing back to whether Congress would work for bankers or families.
Other questions brought up one of my issues, familiar to regular readers here. Asked about the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), she was as unequivocal as she has been on economics. As she bluntly put it, “I think it’s just staggering that the government of the United States would have an official policy to discriminate against some of our people.”
They had to wrap up the event before she called on me. I was ready to put her on the spot, which I’ll do when she comes on Left Ahead. I want to know whether she can see herself as a lion/lioness of the Senate in what is still to many of us Ted Kennedy’s seat. Our current senior Senator has neither the hunger for the right nor the rhetorical and personal power of Kennedy. She seems to, to me. Would she expect to carry that shield?
Regardless, she pegged the progressives at the end by saying she would carry on these battles. “I can’t change. I don’t know how.” If we hadn’t noticed in the previous hour, she said not to expect equivocation from her. As she put it, “You will never doubt what I think about anything.”
Warren added that if she ran for Senate, “it is only because I care about driving these issues home.”
It seems to suggest an attack piece, which it clearly is not. I was wondering who the master would turn out to be.
Of course I didn’t see it as an attack. I was pleasantly overtaken by her mastery of politics, economics, scholarship and rhetoric. She stood. I sat. It’s a bit literal.
I’ve been to two different local democratic organizational meetings in the past two nights and can report that there’s easily a lot of excitement in the air, perhaps as much as there was in 2006, though it’s too early to say that just quite yet. This will still be a race, but at least we can go forward confident, knowing that we have a lot of great people in the mix and the people of this state will be better off for it.
This is very exciting. I do just want to remind you all though, and not to be nitpicky or anything but I’m begging you please do not call it Ted Kennedy’s seat. Not that I care, because I don’t, but I just don’t feel like hearing the rants again in my area about how it’s not Ted Kennedy’s seat. It’s amazing to me how Scott Brown picked up on that one and started calling it the people’s seat and they all loved that and praised scott brown for being so real and so much for the “people”. Uuuggghhh. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he tries to pull that one again, but so long as no-one is quoted saying it during this election then I think he may look silly trying to use it again. I know this probably seems unimportant , but it will drive Scott Brown voters to the polls to preserve the “peoples” seat even though they otherwise have limited understanding of the issues or where he really stands on anything.
Of course, that is hugely amusing in that Brown is as anti-populist, anti-people as you can get. Seeing what Warren has researched and what she did in D.C., and listening to her reminds us what “the people” can mean.
Brown gave our seat to the bankers. Time to take it back!
that we should not refer to this as Ted Kennedy’s seat. I recently read a Democratic activist saying that Scott Brown is quite correct that this is the people’s seat. He then went on to point out that Brown has been voting with Mitch McConnell and the Republicans against the interests of the people.
…to refer to seat as belonging to the person who holds it. Sure, it may be technically more correct to say, “the Massachusetts seat currently held by…”, but people get lazy. For me it makes sense to still call it Kennedy’s seat because Scott Brown is filling Kennedy’s unexpired term. After 2012 it becomes the seat of whomever is elected to a full term, at least as I think of it.
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One would hope with her focus on the difference that government policy makes for ordinary people facing big business, she’d be on to those who want to privatize and corporatize public education, but, in these days of DFER, one can never be sure.
I’d really like to hear her talk about the importance of public accountability for public education, about local control, about thoughtful, engaging, well-rounded education for all kids.
Here’s hoping.
As Lisa Schiff points out in her strong Beyond Chron essay this week:
I too would love to hear the not-quite-candidate’s views on the fate of our public schools and the threats of charterization and privatization to this bedrock of democracy and well being for the growing ranks of those not in the upper income slices.
Would she stand up for public schools, public school teachers, students and parents against efforts to turn the schools that still try to educate EVERYBODY into underfunded dumping grounds for our most challenged student groups?
Personally in a modern mobile society I prefer greater standardization, whereas local control I think of as right-wing code for let’s elect anti-intellectual creationists and climate-deniers to the school board.
At the meeting I was at, she noted that she was a product of public education and that a strong public education system was essential to a future that would benefit the middle and lower classes. Otherwise, we’re in a situation where only those who can afford a good education (or good food or good anything else) for their kids get one.
on any number of other things, she’ll lose people. That’s just how it goes.
If she starts talking about how bad we need coal, for instance, I am straight out.
It’s great to see a lot of competition with multiple strong candidates. but I would personally like to see them compete for a while before choosing to back any of the candidates.
Who gets hurt – probably everyone else. Anyone benefit?
Massachusetts citizens and people all over the country and the world. Elizabeth Warren brings experience in fighting for sensible fiscal policy. Although the other candidates are frustrated because she appears to be sucking the oxygen out of the room, her entry garners added attention to the race and all the candidates. Instead of being constantly blasted by the media on how cutting SSI will create jobs, its great to hear intelligent, articulate people making the case for better policy.
Will the others give her a real go.
to post reminders that the other candidates are “still there”…..