Like all great fighters with a mission, a purpose, and a vision, Elizabeth Warren doesn't have time to despair. The hours are precious, the need is ever-deepening, and wallowing in sadness is a luxury great leaders never afford themselves.
"You know, I used to hate goodbyes," Warren told her staff on a call Thursday on which she informed them she was suspending her campaign. "But then I realized that there is no goodbye for much of what we do. When I left one place, I took everything I’d learned before and all the good ideas that were tucked into my brain and all the good friends that were tucked in my heart, and I brought it all forward with me—and it became part of what I did next."
Still, that on-brand ethic doesn't mean that Warren wasn't emotional when she briefly addressed reporters outside her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and said she wasn't yet ready to endorse another candidate. Warren said that the “hardest” thing was "all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years” to see a female president. She reflected on seeing her name on the presidential primary ballot when she went to vote and thinking, "Wow, kiddo, you're not in Oklahoma anymore,” and that it made her miss her "Momma and Daddy." And instead of being disappointed by her third-place finish in Massachusetts, she said she was deeply grateful for the chance Bay State voters had taken on sending someone with no political experience to Washington.
Emotional, yes, but not dispirited. In terms of who to support, Warren told her supporters, "Let's take a deep breath and spend a little time on this."
On the role gender played in the race, she called it a "trap question." If you say it played a role, everyone calls you a “whiner,” she said. If you say it didn't, "about a bazillion women think, what planet do you live on?" But more than likely, Warren's got a plan for that too, telling the crowd, "I promise you this: I will have a lot more to say about that later on." (Where do I click to preorder?)
Warren ended by touching on all the issues that matter so deeply to her, whether she's running for president or not: people who can't finish a degree or take jobs because they can't find quality affordable child care; people mired in student loan debt; people who are one bad diagnosis away from being financially underwater.
"I had to think a lot about where is the best place for me to go to keep fighting those fights, because those problems don't disappear when I stand here in front of you," she said. "Those problems go on, and my job is to keep fighting and to fight as smartly and effectively as I can."
Surely if there's one thing Warren supporters can trust, it's that she will find a way to leverage her expanded platform into meaningful change for the better, come hell or high water, or maybe lots of blood and teeth on the floor.
As Warren told her campaign staff, "I refuse to let disappointment blind me, or you, to what we've accomplished. ... It's not the scale of the difference we wanted to make but it matters and these changes will have ripples for years to come."
This cycle, Warren changed the conversation through a combination of big ideas backed by a blizzard of detail-laden plans that are now shelf-ready for action. But she also inspired a new generation of fighters by telling Americans that they shouldn’t put up with a country where some 90% of the population has been systemically blocked from reaching for the American dream. Far from being intractable, she demonstrated in plan after plan that those are solvable problems if people are willing to fight for a better way forward.
As Warren told her campaign staff at the end of the call, when she voted Tuesday at the elementary school, she was approached by a mom with two small children who have a nightly ritual. "After the kids have brushed teeth and read books and gotten that last sip of water and done all the other bedtime routines, they do one last thing before the two little ones go to sleep," Warren recounted. "Mama leans over them and whispers, 'Dream big.' And the children together reply, 'Fight hard.'"
The work continues, she said; the fight goes on, and "big dreams," Warren added, "never die."