Elizabeth Warrenās political obituary was written in a thousand hot takes, each one burning hotter than the last. She seemed to be the latest challenger who President Donald Trump had trolled into oblivion, deftly exploiting identity fractures on the left. But standing center stage at the first Democratic presidential debate on Wednesday night,Ā WarrenĀ was back.
HerĀ presidential campaign rolled out of the gate with anemic small-dollar fundraising, raising less than $300,000. Mired in the single digits, she was eclipsed in media attention by an embarrassing pair of contenders: Beto OāRourke, the former congressman, and Peter Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who was paraded around magazine offices as the candidate with brains ā never mind the Harvard law professor.
But on the ground, Warren began connecting with audiences starting the first day she hit the trail ā and launching her campaign early allowed her to more or less put āPocahontasā behind her and reset with an endless stream of new policy ideas. So far, she has risen in the polls along with Bernie Sanders, suggesting that the left is growing its share of the vote. The second choice of most Joe Biden voters, meanwhile, is Sanders, suggesting that he and Warren could continue rising together for some time. But at some point, the two will naturally begin to cannibalize each other, which will test the good will that has long existed between their respective camps.
Though Warren and Sanders now occupy a similar space on the ideological spectrum, Sanders arrived at his positions by moving from the left and moderating over the years, while Warren began further to the right. Both embrace the vocabulary of the fight and are eager to name villains, though Sanders is more prone to connect his politics to his theory of change, the political revolution, which involves mustering a mass social base and deploying it against the structural obstacles in Washington. Warren, throughout the Obama years, was adept at deploying outside progressive forces ā typically online progressive groups and labor unions ā to bring power to bear internally, but she does not make that element of her politics part of her stump speech.
That absence is a reminder to backers of Sanders that Warren is not of the left. Thereās a worry that Warrenās political journey leaves her ill-equipped to lead the type of movement that could successfully implement an agenda in Washington over the objection of entrenched forces. That skepticism seemed to be on her mind as she took a question from NBCās Chuck Todd on Wednesday night about how she would approach Congress if Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is still in charge of the Senate. Her answer alluded to the decision by President Barack Obama to shut down his campaign operation in 2009 after his election and focus instead on the inside game.
āThe will of the people matters,ā she said. āYou better understand, the fight still goes on [after the election]. It starts at the White House and it means that everybody we energize in 2020 stays on the frontlines come January 2021. We have to push from the outside, have leadership from the inside, and make this Congress reflect the will of the people.ā
Warren has returned to top-tier status the same way she rose a decade ago, through her use of plain storytelling, connecting her own upbringing āon the ragged edge of the middle classā to the countryās broader problem of economic inequality and immobility. She often begins the story during the nightmare that was the 1930s. Her first political memory is from around the time she was 6 years old, she told me, listening to stories about the Great Depression in Oklahoma from her grandmother, Hannie Crawford Reed. āThey lost money when those banks closed up,ā she said of her grandparents and extended family. āThey watched these little towns shrivel up when the bank was gone. There was no money, there were no jobs. So my grandmother used to say one thing that was political that I can remember. Sheād say, āFranklin Roosevelt made it safe to put money in banks,ā and she would say, āAnd he did a lot of other things too.āā
The Depression loomed especially large in her family lore. āI wasnāt born until long after the Depression, until after World War II, but I grew up as a child of the Depression, because my grandmother and grandfather, my aunts, my uncles, my mom and my dad, all my older cousins had lived through the Depression,ā she said. āAnd it was such a searing experience in Oklahoma, that the Depression hung around our family like a shroud. It was always there.ā
āIt was such a searing experience in Oklahoma, that the Depression hung around our family like a shroud.ā
Her politics today have been heavily informed by her childhood experiences ā not just by Grandma Hannieās stories of FDR, but also of her familyās Native American background. Her parents eloped at a young age, she was always told, because her fatherās parents objected to him marrying Pauline Reed, citing her Native American roots, which dated back to Hannieās own grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford. Whether family lore is rooted in truth or in myth has little influence on how it is received by a child and later incorporated into an adultās life story, and in Warrenās case, those perceptions would eventually be weaponized by her opponents into a political liability.
Her telling of her familyās financial difficulties, however, has not been challenged. Warren often talks about her father, Donald Herring, suffering a heart attack and being unable to work, the family nearly losing their home. It was only when her mother landed a minimum-wage job at Sears that catastrophe was averted, and the senator has regularly talked about how different a time it was, that a single minimum-wage income could support a family of three. (Her older brothers had left the house by then and joined the military.) The experience marked a starting point in her narrative of the destruction of the middle class over the next several decades, as workersā wages fell in real terms and capital seized the growth from their increasing productivity.
Warren escaped Oklahoma by winning a debate scholarship at George Washington University but got married at 19, dropped out, and moved to Texas to finish college. She was just 21 when she had Amelia, whoād later become her co-author. At the time, the responsibility of caring for her new daughter was an obstacle between Warren and her plans to go to law school. Amelia was 2 when Warren started at Rutgers University.
That experience, too, has become part of her 2020 cycle stump speech. Her anecdotes of parenting struggles routinely evoke knowing laughter. She recalls her furious determination to potty-train Amelia by age 2, so that she could get her into daycare and go to class. In another, she highlights the tyranny of naps, remembering driving Amelia home after class, one hand to both operate the wheel and shift gears, and the other hand precariously stretched into the back seat, gripping and shaking Ameliaās foot so sheād stay awake. One nod in the back seat, the afternoon nap is ruined ā along with her only opportunity to study.
Next came Alexander, and the family moved to Texas, where Warren tried her hand at homemaking. It was not her thing. Washing dishes one night, she turned to her husband and said simply, āI want a divorce.ā
Warrenās path to becoming a prominent left-wing, anti-corporate politician was anything but direct. She was for decades what a political consultant might refer to as an infrequent voter, often missing midterms and primaries. And, despite her formidable education and intellect, she was a low-information one at that.
As the decade wore on, Warrenās career as a law professor had taken off. She got a job teaching at Rutgers Law School, then, in 1978, at the University of Houston Law Center. There, she began what would become her landmark research on bankruptcy in 1981, with Jay Westbrook and Terry Sullivan, a study that continues to the present day. When Warren started it, she was still a believer in free-market orthodoxy and influenced by a conservative law school ideology called ālaw and economics.ā She approached the research from a right-wing angle, expecting to prove that people filing for bankruptcy were trying to bilk the system.
The results of the research woke Warren up politically, and she rejected the law and economics ideology she had tried on. āWhen we went into the whole consumer bankruptcy thing,ā Westbrook said, āI think her attitude was very much balanced between, on the one hand, No doubt there are people who have difficulties and theyāre struggling and so forth, and on the other hand, By golly, you ought to pay your debts, and probably some of these people are not being very committed to doing what they ought to do.ā
Warren said that doing the work changed her politics. āTerry and Jay went into that with a pretty sympathetic lens that, These are people, letās take a look, give them the benefit of the doubt that they had fallen on hard times,ā she said. āI was the skeptic on the team.ā
āI had grown up in a family that had been turned upside-down economically, a family that had run out of money more than once when there were still bills to pay and kids to feed ā but my family had never filed for bankruptcy,ā she said. āSo I approached it from the angle that these are people who may just be taking advantage of the system. These are people who arenāt like my family. We pulled our belts tighter, why didnāt they pull their belts tighter?ā
āWhen I looked at the numbers, I began to understand the alternative for people in bankruptcy was not to work a little harder and pay off your debt. The alternative was to stay in debt and live with collection calls and repossessions until the day you die.ā
But then she looked into the stories of those who had. āThen we started digging into the data and reading the files and recording the numbers and analyzing whatās going on, and the world slowly starts to shift for me, and I start to see these families as like mine ā hard-working people who have built something, people who have done everything they were supposed to do the way they were supposed to do it,ā she said. Now they āhad been hit by a job loss, a serious medical problem, a divorce, or death in the family, and had hurtled over a financial cliff. And when I looked at the numbers, I began to understand the alternative for people in bankruptcy was not to work a little harder and pay off your debt. The alternative was to stay in debt and live with collection calls and repossessions until the day you die. And thatās when it began to change for me.ā
The research the team produced is widely cited around the issue of bankruptcies driven by medical emergencies, but it contains a less-heralded, though no less poignant finding: Many bankruptcies were caused by families moving to better neighborhoods than they could afford to get better schools for their kids.
From there, said Warren, she zoomed out from the particular stories of hardship she was encountering and began asking why she was seeing so much more of it in the 1980s than she had before.
āThis happens over the space of a decade, I began to open up the questions I asked. I started with the question of the families who use bankruptcy. But over time it becomes, So why are bankruptcies going up in America?ā she said. āWhat was changing in the 1980s and 1990s? What difference was there in America?ā
The answer to that question, she said, led her to become a Democrat. āI start to do the work on how incomes stay flat and core expenses go up, and families do everything they can to cope with the squeeze. They quit saving. They go deeper and deeper into debt, but the credit card companies and payday lenders and subprime mortgage outfits figure out thereās money to be made here, and they come after these families and pick their bones clean. And thatās who ends up in bankruptcy. So thatās how it expands out,ā she said. āAnd by then, Iām a Democrat.ā
In 1995, Warren was named to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. That role and her activism that came after it gave her a first taste of national politics, but it was the 2007 financial crash that brought her to Washington for good. Congress finally approved its bailout of Wall Street in early October 2008, and one of the conditions tacked on was that a commission would be established to audit how the money was being spent. The elections in November came and went, and Washington forgot about that provision. So the Treasury Departmentās inspector general took matters into his own hands, and told the Washington Post that the bailout was āa messā and there was nobody watching the billions of dollars go out the door.
Harry Reid, then-Senate majority leader, and Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, scrambled, but Reid had somebody in mind: the Harvard professor he remembered from the fight over bankruptcy.
Reid phoned Warren at home in Cambridge in mid-November 2008. She was about to host a barbecue for law students when the call came. āHarry Reid,ā the soft voice said.
āWho?ā she asked.
āUm, Harry Reid,ā he repeated softly, pausing. āMajority leader, U.S. Senate.ā
āOh,ā she said.
He asked her to chair the commission that would oversee the bailout funds, and with no clue what that entailed, she said yes on the spot. Reid, who does not do small talk, simply hung up.
āI found her, put her on the debt commission. I read one of her books on poverty. She was a Harvard professor and she was just good from the get-go,ā Reid told me.
Warren demonstrated an ability to create power where it didnāt exist before.
The commission was virtually powerless, but Warren demonstrated an ability to create power where it didnāt exist before. As chair of the commission, she used the platform to brutalize Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner every time he came before her. The exchanges went viral and earned her an enemy for life. She wasnāt thinking of her long-term career. āGrowing up, I never saw an appetite for politics. Even now, I donāt think she really likes Washington or politics. Sheās just there to do this one thing,ā her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, told a Vogue reporter in 2010.
The gavel also put her in closer contact with members of Congress, and she used the proximity to push her idea for an agency dedicated to regulating consumer financial products, which she had first spelled out in an essay published in the journal Democracy in the summer of 2007. Its title, an homage to Ralph Naderās consumer protection days, was āUnsafe at Any Rate.ā
When she sat down with Barney Frank, then the House Financial Services Committee chair, he told Warren that he wanted to regulate the banks before turning to her consumer bureau. She told him about Grandma Hannie. āOne of the earliest conversations we had about how to think about financial reform in the wake of the 2008 crash was, What goes first? Whatās the first thing we need to think about? And Barney wanted to start with the nonbank financial institutions,ā she said, āand stronger regulations over the largest, too-big-to-fail banks.ā
Warren agreed that the argument made sense on a policy level, but politically it was important to win peopleās trust. āI argued back to Barney that we needed to start where the crash had started, and where families understood it and felt it and that was, family by family, mortgage by mortgage, how those giant banks had taken down the economy. He and I were kind of going back and forth and then I said, Barney, let me tell you about my grandmother, and I told him that story,ā she said. āOnce he made it safe to put money in banks, my grandmother trusted Franklin Roosevelt. And so my argument to Barney was, Start where people will understand what weāre trying to do. And thatās with the consumer agency. And you know Barney, he has the quickest mind on earth ā he cocked his head, took about 3 seconds and said, Youāre right. Weāll start with the consumer agency.ā
It was an uncanny insight for a politician, if she could be called one by then, and it was made possible, perhaps, by the decades she spent before becoming one. If Warrenās launch into politics can be pinpointed to 1995 with her commission appointment, that would mean that well into her 40s, she was still living, voting, and thinking, politically speaking, at least, like a regular person.
Warren still seemed like a regular-ish person when I first encountered her on April 10, 2009, at a Capitol Hill press conference where she joined a handful of House and Senate Democrats in introducing a bill to create something then called the āFinancial Product Safety Commission.ā
I quoted her at length in an article in the Huffington PostĀ that day. Finally, here was someone talking in plain English about how the banks had caused the financial crisis by ripping off regular people, and how it could be stopped: āIf there had been an agency, like the Financial Product Safety Commission, that had said, You just donāt get to fool people on pricing, then what would have happened is there would have been millions of families who got tangled in predatory mortgages who never would have gotten them.ā
Without all those predatory mortgages that quickly imploded, she continued, thereād have been no housing bubble to pop. āIt never would have been as profitable for mortgage brokers and others in the financial services industry to market these products, because they would not have been such high-profit products,ā Warren explained. āIf we never would have started at the front end, we never would have fed them into the financial system.ā
She cultivated relationships with members of the blogosphere and progressive media in a way that few politicians were doing at the time.
The Wall Street reform bill that would come to be known as Dodd-Frank was being dragged through Congress by Warrenās consumer agency throughout 2009. The law professor and blogger worked the halls of Congress with her longtime aide Dan Geldon, who had previously been her student. Warren and Geldon, who would become her presidential campaign manager in 2019, both had an understanding of her ability to drive media coverage toward a particular element of the debate. She cultivated relationships with members of the blogosphere and progressive media in a way that few politicians ā though she wasnāt quite one yet ā were doing at the time. But she also met privately with as many lawmakers as she could.
In the summer of 2009, Warren and Geldon stopped in for a meeting with Chicagoās Melissa Bean, who had expressed interested in Warrenās idea for a consumer financial protection agency, but raised one objection after another. āWell, she didnāt agree with much of anything, but at least she was talking. Maybe we have a shot at persuading her,ā Warren told Geldon. āFor a moment, Dan looked like he was weighing whether to give me the bad news,ā Warren later recalled. The bad news was that Bean had just run through, in order, every talking point that had been included in a press release sent that morning by the American Bankers Association.
Warren first met with David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama, by coincidence, the day after Democrats lost a special election for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in December 2009. Axelrod recognized that there was an anger in the population that the White House needed to understand and grapple with. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he told Warren, was a clear way to do that. āWe need to fight for this thing, need to show weāre standing up for people and not just banks,ā he said. The White House had always been publicly supportive of the CFPB, but now it was committed on a political level too.
As the Dodd-Frank bill moved to completion in the spring of 2010, Reid saw a chance for a political win-win. He put the bill on the floor, knowing it didnāt have 60 votes, but from his perspective, there was no bad outcome. Either Republicans blocked Wall Street reform, which would make them look awful, or theyād support it, which would be its own good thing.
As cloture vote after cloture vote failed, Reid eventually grew impatient. He wanted to pull the bill off the floor and move on, said Chris Dodd, then chair of the Banking Committee. āI and others were able to convince him that no, that we thought we could win the issue and we ought to keep it up,ā Dodd said.
That May, in an interview with the Huffington Postās Shahien Nasiripour, Warren put it in simpler terms: No more compromises. āMy first choice is a strong consumer agency,ā she said. āMy second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.ā
She got her first choice.
Once the CFPB had been created, the question turned to who would run it. Geithner, the treasury secretary, argued internally it absolutely could not be Elizabeth Warren, but his well-known animosity toward her had the counterintuitive effect of blunting his criticism.
āMy second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.ā
Geithner found an ally in Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff, who called Harry Reid following news reports that Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., opposed Warrenās nomination to the post. āWe donāt like her either,ā Emanuel told the majority leader. The āweā in that formation was only partly true, as Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett were pushing for Warren internally. Though Reid had been a patron of Warrenās, there wasnāt much he could do, as the White House controls appointments. He spread the word that it wouldnāt be Warren, and Nelson got on board. āWe wanted her to be the person who led the consumer [bureau] and I had a little pushback from my own caucus,ā Reid said, āmainly one senator whose name I wonāt announce, but with that, I didnāt feel I could push it at that time.ā I asked if Emanuel had relayed the White Houseās concerns. āI do not remember that, but with Rahm,ā he said, āthe first few words of any conversation was a bunch of swear words, so maybe we never got to the crux of the conversation.ā
Keeping Warren off the agency she had created, however, was a difficult position to hold publicly. Warren, after all, had come up with the idea for the agency and then had been its most vocal champion, both publicly and privately, as it ran through a sewage pipeline of bank lobbyists and came out clean on the other side.
Before the administration announced its decision, it invited first-term senators to the White House for a meet and greet. Among them were several allies of Warren, including Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley. Sanders pressed the point, asking Obama if he would name Warren to run the agency. Obama held up a glass of water. āThatās the problem with you progressives,ā he said. āYou see this as half-empty.ā
It was clear, however, Warren didnāt have 60 votes to be confirmed to the position. But Nasiripour discovered something useful in the way the law was written: The president was entitled to name somebody to establish the agency while the Senate deliberated on a permanent director. Progressive groups led a pressure campaign for Obama to name Warren to that temporary spot, and Geithner was overruled. Warrenās condition for accepting the job was that she would also be given the title of senior adviser to the president, so Geithner couldnāt push her around.
Still, he set out to embarrass her early, leaking to the press that she was demanding a fancy new paint job in her office. Warren confronted him about the egregiously sexist attack and the leaks stopped. Geithner and his chief of staff, Mark Patterson, under pressure from an embarrassed White House, both apologized to Warren, and she set up the agency without Geithnerās interference.
Scott Brown, whose 2010 special election victory earlier had blown up Democratsā 60-vote supermajority, was up for re-election in 2012. His approval rating in Massachusetts was through the roof, and it looked like favorite son Republican Mitt Romney would be running for president, making it a tough year for Democrats to win back the seat.
Guy Cecil was in charge of recruiting candidates that year for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He traveled multiple times to Massachusetts, but couldnāt find anybody willing to take Brown on. āScott Brown is unbeatable,ā Cecil was told. āHeās too good. None of the old guard wanted to run against him.ā
He knew sheād make a good candidate because of the questions she asked.
He turned his sights on Warren, part of a DSCC strategy that year to recruit the most progressive candidate they thought was electable in each state, a conscious policy he said they had not employed in previous cycles. āIād go to Elizabethās apartment on Friday nights and weād have a beer,ā Cecil said. He knew sheād make a good candidate because of the questions she asked. What is my job description as a candidate? What do I do? What decisions am I responsible for rather than my campaign manager? Chuck Schumer, too, knew that in Massachusetts, in the right political environment, Brown could be beaten. So the man nicknamed āWall Street Chuckā helped recruit Wall Streetās No. 1 enemy to run for the Senate.
During her last day at the White House, Warren sat down for an exit interview of sorts with Obama. She gave him the same advice she would later give Hillary Clinton ahead of her run for president, that he needed to understand how much anger was out there, and to surround himself with people who understood that, rather than with people from Wall Street and from the Rubin wing of the party. The housing and foreclosure crises were still ripping through the country, and she pressed him to take them seriously. He said that he wanted to hear more from her on what his approach to housing policy should be. āGet my email from Anita,ā he said, explaining that it was a complicated pseudonym.
As she left, she told his assistant, Anita Decker Breckenridge, what the president had said. Well, just email me and Iāll make sure he gets it, she said, in what was likely a choreographed routine. Warren later emailed her some housing policy ideas, though nothing came of it.
Not long after Warren announced sheād be running for Senate, I went to Massachusetts to watch her campaign. But first I stopped at the encampment of Occupy Boston, which was then in full swing in the cityās financial district. I wanted to know what the occupiers thought of Warren, fully aware that many of them eschewed electoral politics entirely. I was surprised to find about half of the people I spoke with were fully in support of Warrenās run, even as they condemned the idea of electoral politics as a viable path to change.
Later that week, at an event at a VFW hall in Brockton, somewhere in the middle of the state, she greeted people as they entered, gabbing amiably. I asked her how she was enjoying retail politics, and she said that she got a thrill from engaging with so many people. āI was born to do this,ā she said, quickly clarifying that she was referring to how much she enjoyed it, not that she was Godās gift to glad-handing.
Moments into her speech, with my video camera running, she was interrupted by a tea party supporter who stood up and began berating her. He said heād been unemployed since February 2010, objected to Warrenās expressed affiliation with the frustrations of Occupy Wall Street, and argued that the tea party has been protesting Wall Street excess for longer than the nascent global movement camping out in downtowns across the country.
The crowd tried to shout the man down, but Warren told her supporters to let him speak. āNo, no, itās alright. Let me say two things,ā she said. āIām very sorry that youāve been out of work. Iām also very sorry that the recent jobs bill that wouldāve brought 22,000 jobs to Massachusetts did not pass in the Senate.ā
Warren went on to address his question about her association with Occupy Wall Street. āIāve been protesting whatās been going on on Wall Street for a very long time,ā she said, adding that the movement had its own independent agenda and would proceed along its own course.
āI actually felt sorry for the guy. I really genuinely did.ā
āYeah, so has the tea party,ā the man said, before losing his cool. āWell, if youāre the intellectual creator of that so-called party,ā he said, āyouāre a socialist whore. I donāt want anything to do with you.ā The crowd now shouted him down as he added that Warrenās āboss,ā presumably referring to the president, was āforeign-born.ā He then attempted to storm out through a side door, but found it locked. āSo, we are here to do work, and I think we have a reminder that we have a lot of work to do,ā she said as the heckler continued to struggle with the door, before awkwardly retreating out the back of the VFW hall instead.
A Republican tracker with a video camera was at the event, too, so after it ended, in order to conduct an interview, Warren and I ducked into the back seat of her car, parked in the VFW lot. With two of her aides in the front seats, the tracker shot footage of the car from just feet away.
Warren, in the darkness, reflected on the manās outburst, which she said was her first such encounter: āI actually felt sorry for the guy. I really genuinely did. Heās been out of work now for a year and a half. And bless his heart, I mean, he thought somehow it would help to come here and yell names.ā
The assault stuck with Warren, and she continued to think about it throughout the night. I did, too, and I was conflicted about whether to report on it. It was an interesting exchange, and it foreshadowed the furor of the 2016 presidential campaign, a glimpse into the twisted rage that was transforming politics, rooted in economic anxiety and expressing itself as dangerous racism and misogyny. On the other hand, I didnāt want to encourage copy cats and put her or other politicians at greater risk. Earlier that year, Gabby Giffords, one of the friendliest, warmest members of the House, had been shot in the head and nearly killed.
Warren emailed me later that evening to say she still wasnāt upset with the man himself, but rather with those who attempt to channel his anger in a malevolent direction. āI was thinking more about the heckler. Iām not angry with him, but he didnāt come up with the idea that his biggest problem was Occupy Wall Street,ā she said. āThereās someone else pre-packaging that poison ā and thatās who makes me angry.ā
I ended up deciding to publish the video, and Warren later said she was glad that I did, even though that night she had hoped I wouldnāt.
Warren turned out to be a strong candidate and began out-polling Brown. Cecil said that when heād talk to the old guard in Boston, they remained unimpressed, ācomplaining that Warren should be up by more.ā Her campaign would be tested in April 2012, when an article appeared in the Boston Herald that continues to resonate. It originated with a tip from a Native American Republican, who reached out to GOP operatives and told them that Warren had previously claimed Native American status, a claim he found questionable.
As Warren had surged in her career, she started moving in circles that were further and further from her Oklahoma roots. At the same time, her aunts began passing away, leaving her feeling unmoored. Itās not at all unusual for non-Native families in Oklahoma to grow up with stories about Native heritage, and Warrenās was among them. In the 1980s, she began listing herself as Native American.
The Herald article noted that claims of Native American heritage were fairly common. āBoth Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama claim to have Native American heritage, but we were never able to find evidence of that, and in both cases we traced their ancestry fairly thoroughly,ā Christopher Child, a genealogist at the New England Historic and Genealogical Society, told the Herald.
Internally, Warrenās staff scrambled to find documentation to back up the stories told by Grandma Hannie, but came up empty. āIām very proud of my heritage. Iām very proud of the stories my grandparents gave me,ā Warren responded, as pressure continued to mount. Her staff urged her to make clear to the public that she had not received any special treatment in the hiring process at any university. Though it was true ā and an exhaustive Boston Globe examination in 2018 would find that it never came up in Harvardās decision-making ā she refused, telling her aides she didnāt want to appear as if she were undermining affirmative action, or implying that affirmative action was somehow wrong.
Because she genuinely believed the family lore, she was in a difficult position and felt she couldnāt simply apologize and move on without betraying her family. Her efforts to explain how prevalent the lore was in her family only backfired, coming off as tone-deaf, as when she relayed the story of her grandfatherās photo that sat on her mantle. āMy Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least a thousand times,ā Warren told reporters, and āremarked that her father, my papaw, had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do, because thatās how she saw it. She said, And your mother got those same great cheekbones and I didnāt. She thought this was the bad deal she had gotten in life.ā
Right-wing protesters stalked her at events, regularly breaking into whoops and chants and tomahawk chops. Despite it all, she beat Brown on Election Day by 8 points. Victory has a way of burying scandal, with the unwritten rule being that it will remain buried unless and until the politician seeks a higher position. But for now, she was on her way to becoming a senator, and I tagged along to watch her become official.
Warren was sworn into office on January 3, 2013. As we ascended a staircase in the capitol building that morning, Warren was directed by an attendant to an elevator marked āSenators Only.ā āPretty cool,ā she said, when I asked how it felt to take the exclusive ride.
Though she had been lobbying the Senate on bankruptcy issues on and off since that first rodeo with Kennedy, being on the floor was a new experience. āThatās the first time Iāve ever been on the Senate floor, literally the first time,ā said Warren of the dark blue carpeting she had threatened three years earlier to cover with āblood and teeth.ā
Senators get sworn in twice ā once for real, and then once ceremonially in the Old Senate Chamber. She gathered with friends, family and supporters in the Kennedy Caucus Room before that ceremonial swearing in to take Kennedyās seat.
I noted that Sen.Ā Daniel Webster had delivered his famous āLiberty and Unionā speech in the chamber Warren was about to enter. She would be taking Websterās seat, though not his desk.
āDaniel Websterās desk goes to the senator from New Hampshire, not the senator from Massachusetts,ā she noted, ever the professor, adding that she had heard it skipped over the border by dint of the great oratorās last will. Webster, she noted, wasnāt just a senator from Massachusetts but held Kennedyās seat, as did former President John Quincy Adams and the famous abolitionist Charles Sumner ā who left actual blood on the Senate floor when he was brutally beaten within an inch of his life by a pro-slavery South Carolina congressman.
As she and her husband Bruce Mann waited in line outside the old chamber, which is bathed in a plush red velvet, they watched as other women were sworn in. One of them was Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat from North Dakota. Joe Biden, as vice president, was charged with emceeing the proceedings. āSpread your legs, youāre gonna be frisked,ā Biden told the Heitkamp family. Warren was speechless, as was Heitkamp. Biden, through decades of saying idiotic and offensive things on the regular, had effectively raised the bar on what could possibly be considered a gaffe. But even he seemed to sense he may have managed to clear it with that one. Apparently, when a photographer had told Heitkampās husband to move one of his hands, Bidenās mind had gone to a police pat-down, and his mind had gone, as usual, directly out of his mouth. āYou say that to somebody in North Dakota, they think itās a frisk. Drop your hands to your side, yāknow?ā Biden added, trying to make the joke land. Warren and her husband looked at each other.
Biden turned to Heitkampās husband, hoping for a bailout. āThey think youāre in trouble, right? You drop your hands to the side ā¦ā Her husband did his best to ignore him. āAhhh, Iām a little formal, I know,ā Biden concluded.
āWeāre going to not only make history, weāre going to change history.ā
Biden was on better behavior swearing in Warren. Sen.Ā Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., the first woman elected without following a husband to the upper chamber, found Warren later on the Senate floor. She barely came up to Warrenās shoulder as the two embraced. Mikulski attached an official Senate pin to the lapel of the incoming senatorās pantsuit. āThink of it,ā Mikulski said she told Warren, ālike the Croix de Guerre for all the battles we women have fought.ā
āCongratulations,ā Mikulski said, with her eyes watering as she beat her hand against her heart. āYou stand here now in the footsteps of so many women who for so long would have liked to have been here, should have been here, but didnāt get the shot. Youāve got the chance. You have a band of sisters. And weāre going to not only make history, weāre going to change history.ā
This article was adapted from āWeāve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movementā by Ryan Grim, published by Strong Arm Press.Ā
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