Elizabeth Warren’s investment in building a strong campaign was evident everywhere in her Monday afternoon event in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Volunteers were working the long line of people hoping to get in—some 850 were ultimately packed into the historic Peterborough Town House—and staffers were quietly visible throughout, ferrying information to the press and showing up in the crowd with microphones as questions began. Warren herself, on the day she announced a $19.1 million haul for the second quarter, was … absolutely Elizabeth Warren, and the crowd loved it.
Speaking outside the building to an overflow crowd, she said that there was “bad news and good news. The bad news is that there’s no more room inside. The good news is that there’s no more room inside!” A supporter shouted out congratulations on that $19.1 million and Warren swiftly turned it into commentary on the possibility of building a real grassroots campaign. Then she promised them selfies, because of course she did.
Inside the hall, many of Warren’s stories were well trod for those who are paying attention to the 2020 presidential race. But three things stood out at this event: The emotion Warren brings to stories she must by now have told dozens if not hundreds of times; the seamless whole of her personal, political, and policy framework; and how, in this stand-alone event, she expanded on the stories and answers that are familiar from having been honed down to television-friendly bits.
Warren’s voice was ever so slightly hoarse around the edges throughout, but still, it audibly roughened as she recounted, after her father’s heart attack and the family losing its station wagon, finding her mother getting dressed—in her good dress—to go apply for a job at Sears, saying “We are not going to lose this house.” It’s a story she’s told so many times, but one that still clearly retains power for her, and so for the audience.
So too the story of the day Warren told her Aunt Bee that she was going to have to quit teaching law school because the struggle to find good childcare was too much, and Aunt Bee said “I can’t get there tomorrow, but I can come on Thursday.” I’ve heard it before, read it before, could probably recite the bare bones from memory, but it was still different in the context of the complete framework Warren was laying out in an unbroken arc, live in person. It sounded like that moment was real to her, alive in her memory, as she said it, so it felt real to me as I heard it. “I’m on this stage today because my Aunt Bee arrived,” she said. “How many women of my generation just got knocked off the track and never got a chance to come back? How many women of my daughter’s generation got knocked off the track and never got a chance to come back?”
That unbroken arc of Warren’s interwoven personal and policy narrative was on full display: In her opening stump speech, she talked about the $50 a semester commuter college—cheap enough to pay for with a part-time waitressing job—that she attended early in her first marriage, and in a question about why she is running for president, she returned to that $50 a semester tuition, noting that it wasn’t that cheap because education was mysteriously cheaper back in the day, but because Texas had invested in public higher education—exactly the kind of investment that Warren is calling for today.
The pieces of what made Elizabeth Warren possible, what got her an education and a job teaching at Harvard Law School and into the United States Senate and onto this stage, are assembled into a policy vision of what should be possible for everyone. And as much as she focuses on the investments and opportunities of the past, she’s clear that America “didn’t open doors to everybody, not by any stretch,” that a $50 billion investment in historically black colleges and universities, for instance, is just the beginning of leveling the playing field.
Third, while Warren is generally seen as better at answering questions than at straight-up stump speech, in her Monday speech she drew some laughs with, for instance, a description of her brother who trained as a combat medic and remains perpetually on alert to the possibility of doing an emergency tracheotomy. “We have a rule in our family, and that is never choke around David.”
In these scattered spots through the speech and her answers to questions—of which she only had time to get to three—she had the crowd laughing, which is not part of the typical portrayal of her as a teacher, a professor, and a policy wonk. (Though of course good teachers are funny.) But more, she answered the question of whether her policy vision could expand to fill an entire presidential run. She provided not just the series of policies that have distinguished her campaign, but the connective tissue between them; not just the origin story of her family’s economic struggles or her own struggles to find adequate childcare, but the story of how, in her career as a law professor, she analyzed the struggles of working families from a series of highly technical legal angles as she taught classes in contracts and bankruptcy and commercial law.
Elizabeth Warren came on the political scene with manifest talents and a series of viral moments. Now she’s showing us both that that professional history as a legal teacher and scholar always meant more than we could see on the surface, and that she can and will continue to grow.