Elizabeth Warren: Meet the woman with a plan to take the White House

As an impeachment row rocks the President, and scrutiny mounts over Joe Biden, it's a liberal with revolutionary policies who's surging ahead for the Democrats. Could Elizabeth Warren go all the way?
Elizabeth Warren campaigning on Wednesday
Kristopher Radder/AP
Philip Delves Broughton26 September 2019

The 2020 Presidential election has been thrown into disarray by the impeachment process launched against Donald Trump. It not only threatens the President, but also the Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden.

Congress is investigating charges that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into the financial dealings of Biden’s son, Hunter. As scrutiny mounts on Biden and his family, it could open the way for Senator Elizabeth Warren. Once derided as too wonky and liberal, she has broken through as a serious candidate to be the Democrats’ challenger to President Trump.

The latest polls put her ahead of former the vice-president in Iowa, which will be the first state to vote in next year’s Democratic primaries.

Her energetic, upbeat campaigning has made her the first choice for 22 per cent of potential voters, up from 15 per cent in June. Flat-footed Biden, who had a strong lead through the summer, has dropped from 24 per cent to 20 per cent. — so the two are in a statistical tie, well ahead of all the other challengers.

Biden’s pitch has been that he is the only Democrat who can attract a broad, centrist base to defeat Trump. But his old-school style, heavy on back-slapping and favour-trading, light on ideas, is looking threadbare and entitled.

Warren’s campaign, by contrast, has been brisk and well managed, reminiscent of Barack Obama’s successful 2008 bid for the presidential candidacy.

Last week, 20,000 of her supporters showed up in Manhattan, and just two miles north of Wall Street Warren used the word “money” as a bludgeon to press the central theme of her campaign: that government has been captured by business interests. A society in which the wealthiest 0.1 per cent own nearly as much as the bottom 90 per cent, she argues, is not sustainable.

Warren’s events now follow a certain style. She bounds onto the stage, punching the air yelling “Yes!” Sometimes she is accompanied by her golden retriever Bailey. Her speeches are full of policy detail but are built around strong, emotional stories, often drawn from her own life. Afterwards she will stay for hours posing for selfies with supporters. She assiduously calls anyone who has given money to her campaign, even those who give just a few dollars.

Elizabeth Warren under the Washington Square Arch earlier this month
Getty Images

Early in her campaign, she was considered too professorial, too wonky to connect with voters. But in an era of Trumpian waffling her reams of policy ideas have become an advantage. Her supporters now wear T-shirts emblazoned with Warren’s mantra: “I’ve got a plan for that!” She has plans to tax the rich with a new wealth levy on assets over $50 million; to make housing and childcare more available; to ease the burden of student loans; to protect the environment; and to give workers more power in companies. She insists she is a capitalist to her bones but believes markets need to be better regulated to serve the common good.

Some Democrats worry she is too progressive and fear she will alienate centrists and be an easy target for Trump next year. The President regularly calls her Pocahontas, a dig at her disputed claims of Cherokee heritage. DNA tests recently showed her assertions were highly tenuous.

But Warren has shown surprising strength in taking the abuse, and surviving the circus of early candidate debates. Her message is likely to appeal to white working-class voters who backed Trump but are now suffering as a result of his numerous trade wars. And she has an intriguing personal story, which is in stark contrast to the tycoon’s privileged past.

Warren, 70, grew up in Oklahoma, where her father worked as a salesman in a department store and later as a janitor. When she was 12, her father had a heart attack and lost his job. The family’s car was repossessed and her mother put on her one good dress and went and got a job at homeware store Sears, answering phones for the minimum wage. Warren would hear her through her bedroom wall sobbing under the stress of it all.

Warren studied law and became a professor. She had two children during her first marriage, which ended in 1978 after eight years. Two years later, she married a fellow legal scholar, Bruce Mann, now a professor at Harvard Law School. Early in her career, she was not political, and favoured the self-regulation of markets and business. But during the Eighties, she travelled around America’s courts studying personal bankruptcy cases. The ordinary Americans she found were not reckless, financial gamblers. They had been pushed by extreme need to take out high-interest loans which they could not afford to repay, and their lenders were merciless about recouping the money.

Her political conversion continued during the Nineties, when she was called to serve on a commission in Washington studying the nation’s bankruptcy laws. She spent eight years fighting to make it easier for people to declare personal bankruptcy, but eventually lost. During that time she became a professor at Harvard Law School, and switched her party allegiance from Republican to Democrat. One of her key opponents during this fight was Biden. Though a Democrat, and a self-proclaimed champion of the working classes, Biden was a senator for Delaware, which is home to half of America’s credit card companies. He sided with his financial backers and his support enabled the largely Republican-driven opposition to her proposed reforms to succeed. Memories of that battle have spiced up her challenge to him. She genuinely distrusts him.

Warren was summoned back to Washington in the wake of the financial crisis. Under Obama’s presidency, she led the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency tasked with protecting people from the kind of predatory lending that had to led to the big crash. After Obama left office Warren succeeded Ted Kennedy as one of Massachusetts’s two senators.

If her campaign continues to build at this pitch, Democrats will soon have to choose between her revolutionary style and proposals, and Biden’s evolutionary promise. She could benefit from the rejigging of the primary calendar. California, whose Democrats are naturally progressive, now votes much earlier than it used to. Warren is likely to do very well there, and a victory could propel her to the nomination — and what an epic confrontation of style, intellect and personal history with President Trump that would be.

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