Elizabeth Warren: The Combative Senator Has Plans

The great lady of the American left has more than one plan. Currently, nearly 20. Elizabeth Warren (born in Oklahoma in 1949), who is a Massachusetts senator and a Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential nomination, differs from the abundant number of other candidates in her party as a result of the wide-ranging campaign she is running, including proposals to redefine the economy, a plan to fight the opioid epidemic, a plan to introduce what she calls an “ultramillionaire” tax, a plan to end Puerto Rico’s debt, a plan to reduce the influence of corporations on the Pentagon, a plan to guarantee all women access to abortion, a plan to end the student debt that is choking university undergraduates, a plan to promote green manufacturers, a plan to guarantee that any U.S. president in office can be impeached. Her proposals are so numerous that the slogan on the T-shirts her website sells is, “Warren has a plan for that.”

The senator does not have dreams, only plans that come from not having traveled a perfectly straight path down the road from her native Oklahoma to a seat in the Senate. Warren did not learn about the word eviction, the fragility of the middle class, or indebtedness by studying an economics textbook at Harvard, although she did end up becoming one of their professors. The 69-year-old senator began to forge her political conscience at the age of 12 after her father died. Warren learned many vital things from that loss.

Overnight, the Herring family – Warren was the name of Elizabeth Warren’s first husband, whom she divorced decades ago – watched as the bank robbed them of precious possessions, and Elizabeth’s mother had to abandon her role as a housewife to work at Sears. At 13, Warren worked as a waitress to earn extra income for the family, and at 19, she left school to get married. Long before 2012, when she took up the seat that Ted Kennedy had occupied for four decades, the senator, now a mother, returned to Harvard University as a professor, where she as a mother specialized in the humdrum subject that later became the backbone of her message.

Ten years ago, during the financial crisis, the likes of which had not been seen since the 1930s, Warren rose to fame by interrogating the bankers who had dragged the country into the abyss of the Great Recession. The Harvard lawyer, with her combative rhetoric and old-school liberalism, became the great lady of the United States left. Yet in 2016, Warren decided not to compete with Hillary Clinton, leaving the way clear for her Democratic colleague to become the first woman to run for the White House. After the brutal defeat of the former first lady, when the occasion finally presented itself, Warren declared her candidacy for the 2020 presidential election.

In what has at times seemed a frivolous campaign dedicated to showing which Democratic candidate detests Donald Trump the most, the senator has raised the tone of discourse by putting forward detailed ideas, even if they are at times ambitious and unconventional. Warren has been on the political scene for years, and in ideological terms she has been the most influential figure in a party still trying to come to terms with the end of the Obama era and the disaster of Clinton’s defeat.

At the end of the 1990s, when Warren arrived in Washington to fight a bankruptcy law that she believed penalized families, Warren came to know the only female presidential candidate the United States has had to date. While the first lady was eating a hamburger, Warren told her why the bankruptcy law should not be passed. By the time Clinton had finished her meal, the first lady was so convinced by Warren’s argument that she spoke to her husband, who subsequently withdrew his support for the bill. The law was defeated, signaling what would be Warren’s first political victory.

Today, in a speech that moderate Americans on the left and right could identify with, Tucker Carlson of Fox News praised both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in advance of the opinion polls. With regard to the media, Warren spent months campaigning and produced numerous commercials promoting economic and social policies before Time magazine put her on its famous cover. Previously, and with much less in their saddlebags, candidates like Beto O’Rourke or Pete Buttigieg have become kings of the media stratosphere.

None of that seems to matter to a woman who, according to the media, this week had her “moment.” Warren follows her path by presenting a new plan every day. One of those plans consists of an intelligent strategy to publicize her campaign for free. The candidate tirelessly takes “selfies” with those who attend her rallies, while her campaign encourages followers to upload the pictures to social networks in order to create an expansive web of smiling faces surrounding Warren. In May, the number had reached 20,000, an unquestionable success and the result of a plan.