The Summer of Warren

[BeyondGeography]

A profile in GQ. Some excerpts:

Julia Ioffe joins Elizabeth Warren on the campaign trail, where the surging senator has spent the season overcoming her campaign's wobbly start and getting down to business—trouncing debate foes, climbing in the polls, and somehow making a slew of policy plans feel exciting. Suddenly, she's winning over Democrats by making the grandest ideas sound perfectly sensible, including her biggest pitch of all: That she's the one to beat Trump.

...Tall and wiry, Warren visibly thrums with good cheer. She’s got that kind of pert friendliness stretched taut around a core of steel that some foreigners find confusing in certain willful Americans. But in Warren, both the chipper facade and the steel guts feel genuine: She is a very nice lady who will put up with exactly zero bullcrap. She carried a tiny banana smoothie and was dressed in her standard uniform: black slacks and a black shirt. On top of this neutral canvas, she usually wears either a simple jacket or a cardigan in a solid, bright color—professional but approachable and, as any TV producer will tell you, perfect for a screen. The cardigan on this day was a periwinkle number, which caught the lightly faded blue eyes behind her rimless glasses.

...There is a story Warren has been telling lately, one that explains how she learned the words that have come to define her career—first as a law professor, and more recently as a politician: mortgage, foreclosure, bankruptcy. Long before she encountered them as cold legal terms, those words had a more powerful meaning as the ones whispered late at night by her parents in Oklahoma. This was after her father’s heart attack, when he’d spend long stretches out of work. The family had sold off the station wagon, but it wasn’t enough to keep the creditors at bay. One spring day, 12-year-old Betsy found herself standing in her mother’s bedroom. “Laid out on the bed was the dress,” Warren nearly whispered to a crowd one scorching afternoon in Elkhart, Indiana. “Some of you in here know the dress,” she went on, scanning the predominantly silver-haired room. “It’s the one that only comes out for weddings, funerals, and graduations.” A faint and knowing “yeah” echoed where I sat. “And there’s my mom, and she’s in her slip and her stockinged feet, and she’s pacing and she’s crying. And she’s saying, ‘We will not lose this house. We will not lose this house. We will not lose this house.’ ” The audience was silent as she delivered the line, her voice crackling with tears.

Warren tells this story at each of her town halls, sometimes more than once a day, and every time she tells it, she is on the verge of crying. She doesn’t in the end, but people in the audience do. At every single event I attended, I saw people wiping away tears when she told the story. It was a masterful summoning of sentiment that calls to mind a method actor dredging up the same emotion in the same play, night after night, for a months-long run. American voters demand authenticity of their candidates, despite the obvious and calculated performance of a political race. I wanted to know what happens in that moment—how does Warren manage to move a crowd to tears despite the repetition? I wanted to ask her if what I heard in her voice was real.

“Because I’m back in that room,” she told me, her eyes suddenly brimming. “I can describe the shade of the carpet to you and the bedspread, and I’m there with my mother. And I’m not only there as the little girl standing in the doorway, I’m there in my mother’s heart.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, her eyes blinked away the extra moisture. “She was so frightened,” Warren went on, reprising the story of how her mother—who, at 50, had never worked outside the home—walked to the local Sears, got a minimum-wage job, and saved the family from foreclosure. “I knew how scary it was by the time I was standing in that doorway,” Warren said, her voice gravelly. “I’d heard her cry night after night after night, and I think that for kids sometimes, it’s harder to hear a parent cry, knowing they won’t do it in front of you. That’s really scary.”

That she elicited such empathy in that room in Elkhart was a special feat. It was a relatively conservative corner of a conservative state, and the audience was palpably cool to her when Warren took the stage. Several voters I spoke to before the event weren’t sure what to expect, and one man told me that, though he was curious about the Massachusetts senator, he was sure the country would not elect a woman. Warren said she could sense that the audience wasn’t with her when she started. “Well, it’s not like I walked in and said, okay, diagnosis: Here’s the problem,” she explained. “It’s in the room. And even as I’m being introduced, I can see faces—I’m kind of standing off to the side—and as soon as I got on stage, I thought, the people standing here want to know me better, they want to know who I am and why I’m here. So let’s slow down a little bit, let’s talk a little more, but we got there.” By the end of her speech, most of the able-bodied people in the room were up on their feet, their fists and cheers churning the air.

Her trick isn’t to just read the energy in the room, it’s to feel the people there. And like all of her plans and strategies, she leaves nothing to chance, ensuring that the faces in her audiences are lit, that the crowds are never obscured to her by the curtain of darkness one sees from a bright stage. “It’s very important to me to be able to see faces when I’m doing a town hall,” Warren said. “I don’t want to be in a theater where I’m on stage and the audience is in the dark. This is not a performance, this is a chance to engage, for all of us in the room to think about what’s happening to our country, to our lives, and I need to see faces when I’m talking through that.”

More at https://www.gq.com/story/the-summer-of-elizabeth-warren

[Kurt V.]

1. she will be a very good president

[DeminPennswoods]

2. This is also why she scares the beejeebers out

of Trump - she's smarter and can read and react to "a room" better.

[ms liberty]

3. K&R.K Good article. n/t

[calimary]

4. If she's the nominee or even up for VP, I'm working my tail off for her.

Still got a candle in the window for Jay Inslee. But I’ve always liked her. She knows her stuff and she gets an A for authenticity.

I always enjoy seeing her at rallies. She’s got the work “uniform” down, too. I used to dress like that for work when I was in the news biz. Plain black top and pants. Then you just vary it with the outer layer - a jacket or tunic or shawl of a bright color or beautiful pattern. Even worked for covering the Oscars. Same plain (inexpensive) black top and bottom, but just fancy up the jacket or accessories. It’s a smart strategy - very simple, and it’s economical also. Sheesh - there were some women who’d go out and splurge on evening wear to cover the Oscars. Dressing up was mandatory. Even the messengers and camera crews and assistants had to dress up for the event. And everybody looked like a million bucks. But there are ways to look like it even though you didn’t break the bank to get there.

Warren doing it like that simply tells me she’s practical. And that’s a good quality to have in a leader.

[KPN]

5. Great article! Elizabeth Warren is a force.

She has a good chance in this primary, and will absolutely clobber tRump in the GE in my older white male view. I find it impossible not to like her.

[bloom]

6. I was there - at Elkhart

and I would say that most of the crowd, at least, were already fans - as I was and am.

I am very happy that more people are recognizing her strengths.

[rurallib]

7. Ben in the room when she told that story

And it made me realize that Warren, unlike any candidate for anything I have ever encountered understands what is happening to the poor and middle class. She lived it. Not only does she understand, she is truly determined to do something about it.

She is determined to help people as her TOP priority, not as a side effect for some policy for the wealthy.

[ehrnst]

8. She has the personal touch, real empathy, ability to listen deeply, and the intellect to absorb

new data and incorporate it into her ideas that HRC and Obama have.

I think that being an educator really honed those aspects of her personality.