Why the Smart Money Is Now on Liz Warren

By now, the only Democrats who dearly wish Obama had reconsidered in time to stop an Ivy League law prof from seeking elective office for the first time at age 62 are the other candidates running for the 2020 presidential nomination. That’s because, in this topsy-turvy political landscape we inhabit, vaunting her wonkiness has turned out to be Warren’s rock-star move. Since when has the tag phrase “I have a plan for that” been such a dynamite segue on the campaign trail, triggering audience enthusiasm like Bruce Springsteen unpacking his greatest hits on the way to the climactic “Born to Run”?

Since never, really. By and large, brainiacs only do well in American politics when their intellectual chops come swaddled in more congenial, less daunting qualities: Bill Clinton’s Big Mac fetish and saxophone-playing bubba act, Obama’s hopey-changey charisma. Even Jimmy Carter would almost certainly have lost the 1976 presidential race if he’d stuck with his original plan to keep reminding voters that he was a lot less dumb than Gerald Ford. And Hillary Clinton did lose in 2016 partly because she took it for granted that sensible folk would rather park a know-it-all in the Oval Office than a clueless blowhard with a crude gift of gab.

In fact, Hillary must be quietly steaming in Chappaqua as she watches Warren pull off a magic trick that she couldn’t have in a million years. Not that it mattered, but HRC had policy ideas too—a big, soggy laundry hamper of them. Tinkering aside, though, she couldn’t and didn’t propose anything that departed too much from Obama’s policies. That kind of spoiled any notion that her presidency would be a thrilling voyage through Adventureland for us all once she’d cracked that famous glass ceiling.

Nor could Clinton knit her proposals into anything resembling a larger vision for the country, let alone get people fired up about putting the big scheme into practice. Lately, Warren has been doing both. Her plans for restructuring everything under the sun are bold enough to delight progressives and freak out the Democratic Party centrists who always worry more about turning moderate voters off than they do about turning anyone else in the country on. But her ace in the hole has been her knack for making her ideas sound sensible and loaded with specifics, not vague or woolly-minded.

She’s upfront about where the money will come from to fund her most ambitious initiatives: a new tax on the super-rich, plus another on corporate profits above $100 million. (Skeptics wonder whether fat cats will just figure out a way to dodge them, something they have plenty of practice doing.) Her version of the Green New Deal emphasizes creating “more than a million good jobs” in the clean-energy industry, an upside to reconfiguring our energy priorities that’s so screamingly obvious you wonder why her fellow Green New Dealers aren’t hyping it to the skies. Even Tucker Carlson, of all people, recognized that Warren’s brand of economic populism isn’t so different from what “Trump at his best” promised to deliver.

She wants to convert the Department of Commerce into a Department of Economic Development that would be a lot more proactive. She wants tech behemoths like Google, Facebook and Amazon broken up to make room for competition, in that good old trust-busting way whose logic is hardly anti-capitalist, just better for consumers and upstart businesses alike. “It’s just wrong to call me a socialist,” she’s said, and it’s worth remembering that Warren was a registered Republican once upon a time.

She even has ideas about how to combat the opioid crisis, a problem that few of her rivals except for Amy Klobuchar have shown much interest in tackling head-on. Uncharacteristically, Warren’s version of Medicare for All is as fuzzy as everyone else’s about the future role of private insurers, but that may be the exception that proves the rule. So what’s giving her wonkiness such unexpected traction with potential primary voters? Warren will always be professorial. She can’t help that, and we are virtuously resisting the temptation to say it’s in her DNA. But on the campaign trail, she’s morphed into a figure much more familiar on college campuses than in presidential campaigns: the popular teacher all the kids think is cool, the one who makes quickie tutorials feel like fun.

If you ask us, one of the most welcome surprises of this early stage of the contest is how much Warren seems to be enjoying herself. When she’s in her rock-star mode, she creates energy by being responsive to her audience’s energy, and vice-versa. Her discovery that she’s got a style and not just a repertoire of worthy proposals no doubt helps explain why she’s outpaced Bernie Sanders in the most recent polls, since Sanders’s dogged inflexibility can make him seem like living proof that it’s possible to be charismatic and charmless at once.

Few people would have bet on Warren’s campaign catching fire this way after its botched roll-out late last year. The bizarre New Year’s Eve video of the candidate jumpily drinking a beer and prattling away in her kitchen looked like an outtake from a canceled 1970s sitcom. Her attempt to refute Trump’s “Pocahontas” slur by brandishing triumphant scientific documentation that she might, just might, have a tiny smidgen of Native American ancestry was worse, making Warren seem easily rattled as well as inept. But considering that almost any other response she could have made to the Pocahontas business would probably have been equally disastrous, maybe it’s just as well she got it out of the way early. Once she’d shot herself in the foot like that, even Trump quit bringing it up, and now it’s too late for him to revive it.

Don’t you wonder which desperate Democrat will? Despite outperforming Sanders in the latest polls, Warren hasn’t put much of a dent in Joe Biden’s comfortable lead. Nonetheless, those polls also indicate that his supporters are less enthusiastic about backing him than the other candidates’ boosters are, suggesting that name recognition and his supposed “electability” are what he’s mainly got going for him. Biden probably isn’t doing himself any favors by behaving like the presumptive nominee, either, especially since Iowans aren’t crazy about people who put on airs. His obnoxious strategy of pretending he’s already running against Trump while ignoring the other Democratic contenders for the job is unlikely to survive the first debates, scheduled for later this month.

Needless to say, if handsy Uncle Joe decides to play alpha male by giving Warren—or Klobuchar, or Kirsten Gillibrand—an uninvited smooch or back rub in front of the cameras, it’ll be game over in a very big hurry. Kamala Harris is the one we’d bet on to just haul off and deck him, instantly transforming herself into a long-suffering nation’s heroine. But it’s Warren who’s most likely to exasperate him by showing up the inadequacy of Biden’s let’s-just-go-back-to-normal approach to repairing the damage caused by Trump’s administration. Any indignant Democrat can identify the wreckage, but nobody in the race besides her has the skill set to make the 2020 election all about seizing the opportunity to build something dynamic and new in its place.