Elizabeth Warren Is the Teacher All the Students Hope to Get in the Fall

From Esquire

DES MOINES, IOWA—It is the little moments, the 40-second videos that pop up on the electric Twitter machine accounts of activists and campaign reporters, that give you a sense of the large, humming machine with which Senator Professor Warren thoroughly has wired her campaign into the state of Iowa, at least in the high summer of 2019.

Here she is at the state fair, talking to a crowd along one of the wide boulevards, the people who couldn't find spots in the huge crowd that waited in stifling heat to hear her at the Des Moines Register's candidate soapbox out front, the way Bruce Springsteen turns around to play to the crowd sitting behind the stage. Here she is backstage at some event or another, greeting Senator Kamala Harris like an old college pal, a signifying moment between two powerful women who already share one of the iconic pictures of this campaign. She spends as much time talking to kids as she does to their parents, and she works the crowd like someone born to work the crowds at state fairs.

These are the outward manifestations of what her campaign has put together out here. Several people have reported the fact that the Democratic Party of Polk County put out a call for the presidential campaigns to contribute volunteers for some county project, and that the Warren campaign here filled nearly all of the spots almost immediately. She draws enormous crowds and enormous ovations from those crowds. People see her and holler, unbidden, "Big Structural Change!"—the tagline for all her now-famous syllabus of plans. They chant, "Two cents!", the amount of each dollar over $50 million she proposes to tax to finance the implementation of those plans. (This is reminiscent of the night at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, when the crowd chanted, "Consumer Finance Protection Bureau," at her, which was not an easy thing to chant.) And, in the polls, she can't be said to have had a "moment" yet, but her rise has been steady, easing fears that she might be peaking too soon. She is now a solid second to Joe Biden, and it is still only August of 2019.

But the thing that's sold Elizabeth Warren to Iowa is primarily Elizabeth Warren. None of the candidates seems to be having as much fun as she is. The endless selfies after speeches. The pinky-swears with young girls about how what girls do is run for president. Her willingness to hold town halls anywhere. That loose-limbed, almost goofy wave with which she steps onto every stage. In a gloomy political time, with a humorless sociopathic bully in the White House, and with all the worst impulses of the national Id come out to play, Senator Professor Warren is the campaign's happy warrior, the teacher everybody hopes they get when school starts up again in the fall. People respond to the good feeling around her campaign as much as they respond to the blizzard of policy proposals that campaign has loosed upon the electorate.

She is a liberal academic who lives in Massachusetts, but she is not a Massachusetts Liberal in the easy caricature that has been so useful to the Republicans over the last 40 years. She is neither a quiet technocrat like Michael Dukakis nor a chilly WASPish icon like John Kerry. She is Oklahoma, born and bred, and it shows in the easy way she connects with audiences here. She is not Harvard. She is someone who went to two public universities before she ever got there. There is none of the distance, none of the archness, common to Ivy League academics.

And the people who come expecting a Dukakis or a Kerry come away happily surprised. And the people who come away expecting an ivory-tower Harvard lecturer leave feeling smarter, and experiencing the conquest of learning in a way they haven't felt it since elementary school. None of this is to say what may happen when the guns really open up on her, but it is to say, for now, that Elizabeth Warren is running a campaign of hope and optimism and enthusiasm as surely as did Ronald Reagan, that ol' Iowa radio guy, in 1980, and as surely as Barack Obama did in 2008.

Just on Saturday, she rolled out a plan to address gun violence that included an excise tax on ammunition, an idea the time for which clearly has come, as a number of the candidates have signed onto it. (Thus did a policy proposed by Chris Rock in 1999 become a mainstream Democratic position a decade later.) She talked it up during a forum on gun violence and then went to the fair, where she leaned off the back porch—she loves a good porch—and asked people what they liked best about the fair.

"The food!" someone hollered.

"You!" someone else replied.

She hand-waved both of these until someone mentioned the pigs in competition across the grounds. She spent five minutes talking about them and then walked into the crowd. It took her the better part of an hour to get out of the place.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

You Might Also Like

• HOW TO FIND THE PERFECT SUNGLASSES FOR YOUR FACE SHAPE

• If You Don’t Have a Denim Shirt Yet, What’s Stopping You?

• Why You'll Never Understand Mezcal Like You Understand Scotch