I highly recommend the finely tuned profile of our states Senior Senator penned by that delightful scribe of our daily politics Worcester’s own Charlie Pierce in this weeks Esquire. Titled ‘The Teacher’
A couple of great gems including this story straight out of the Paper Chase:
“So, Mr. Kennedy,” she said, “what’s the definition of assumpsit?”
“It was the first class, first day of law school, and I took the class because she was the professor,” says Mr. Kennedy, now Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, grandson of Bobby Kennedy, grand-nephew of Senator Ted and President Jack, elected to Congress in the same election that brought Elizabeth Warren into the Senate. “I walk in, and I try to take a seat in the last row of the class. I put my head down, and I’d done the reading and I knew the basics of the case, and right before the class, I see that a lot of my classmates are sort of milling around this seating chart, so I go down to it and I see that my seat is in the first row on the right-hand side. I couldn’t believe it. I was mortified.
“I said, ‘I don’t know.’ She said, ‘You don’t know?’ She said, ‘Mr. Kennedy, did you do your reading? You realize, don’t you, that assumpsit is the first word in your reading?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I saw it, and I circled it because I didn’t know what it meant.’ So she said, ‘Do you have a dictionary, Mr. Kennedy?’ I said I hadn’t had a chance to get one yet. She said, ‘That’s what people do when they don’t know what a word is. They look it up in the dictionary. Is there anyone in the class who can help Mr. Kennedy?’ Every hand in the class goes up.
And on her evolution as a campaigner who can connect:
his afternoon, though, with the campaign for the Senate having begun to sway perceptibly, was a measure of her ability to take what she had learned in her life, and especially in her still-new career as a political candidate, and use it to teach the people in the hall what they needed to know about the system that was grinding so many of them into dust. She connected the corruption on Wall Street to the tricks and traps on their credit cards and their mortgage statements, and she connected that to stagnating wages and crumbling infrastructure. They applauded wildly every time she bore down hard on the word union, and it took her a long time to get through the crowd. Scott Brown was finished as a senator by the time she got to the car.
I don’t doubt that the book tour, her appearance on CBS This Morning on Easter Sunday and her appearance ABC News last night will continue to raise the profile and the buzz as it did for then Sen. Obama in 2007. They called Teddy Kennedy the Last Liberal Lion, and I hope Sen. Warren can prove that epitaph premature, we need her fighting strong in the Senate and continuing to be the moral voice of our party on economics.
methuenprogressive says
https://donate.elizabethwarren.com/page/contribute/bookcontest?source=20140422em#.U1cEuVdN6LU
Christopher says
Earlier she was the subject of Rachel Maddow’s “The Interview” segment and later will be Jon Stewart’s guest on The Daily Show.
cwlidz says
My first interaction with her was a few weeks after she announced, at Kate’s annual party. I was standing in a doorway on the other side of the kitchen talking with someone but I notice that it took her over half an hour to get through the kitchen. When she got to me I said: “Don’t you know you are just supposed to smile and shake hands not actually talk to people.” She smiled and said: “I will learn that tomorrow.” I thought Scott Brown was a goner.
abs0628 says
The article by Charlie Pierce is a thing of true beauty, per usual, including a great dig on Scotto:
And the story of how her students figured out too big to fail — amazing.
cwlidz — Thanks for the lovely memory from the campaign. So many great ones. My favorite was getting to see her tend bar at Doyle’s 🙂 and finally get a chance to thank her for running:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/24/1149397/-Elizabeth-Warren-I-am-not-afraid
Can’t wait to read the book — should arrive in my mailbox on Saturday…