The Summer of Warren

[bluewater]

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.

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.

“It’s just Trump trying to find his way to be insulting," Warren says of the president's attacks against her. "But it’s not going to work this time around.”

“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.”

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

[sheshe2]

1. Thank you, bluewater.

[RainCaster]

2. If any candidate could win my heart, it's her

I became a skeptic after Nixon turned his back on my family's conservative values. Reagan's pandering to the RW cemented my leaving the GOP. I have remained on the side lines for decades since then. Mostly voting for Dem's, but always giving the GOP a chance at redemption. As you know, that hasn't happened yet, and I don't imagine it will in my grandkids lifetime.

Elizabeth Warren is a brilliant, sharp, social creature with an ethic I respect. If I was to become committed to any one candidate, it would be her.

[BlueMTexpat]

3. Thanks for the post, bluewater!

I LOVE Elizabeth Warren!

[Autumn]

4. I support her with my heart and my head. I think she will take this.

I love that story because I grew up knowing that dress and the well-guarded nylon stockings.

[HeartlandProgressive]

5. Thank you for posting this.

It reminded me of my own mother so much too.

[Autumn]

6. Yeah it makes me miss my Mom. nt

[calimary]

9. I could be VERY happy with her as the nominee. She would be terrific.

And I love her forcefulness. It’s genuine and heartfelt. You can tell she REALLY gives a damn.

[colorado_ufo]

7. This woman has everything the Wizard could offer -

a brain, a heart, and courage. The one thing the Wizard can't give is your vote.

That's up to each one of us.

[NNadir]

8. It certainly moves me every time I hear it.

When I was a boy it wasn't quite as bad as it was for her, but I can certainly relate.

My dad faced lay offs and strikes. (His pension vanished with Jimmy Hoffa's body.)

[humbled_opinion]

10. I can't wait until 1/20/21

That day I will say congratulations Madam President. I and millions upon millions of other Americans are chomping at the bit for President Warren to usher in a new and Historic time in American History. Everytime I hear hear speak I get goosebumps, excitement for the possiblity of what the future holds. Love it and thanks for posting.