Last summer, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor, held a series of houseparties around Massachusetts, to test support for a possible run for the United States Senate. A veteran Democratic activist in Andover named M J Powell recalled, “They called me on a Thursday and asked if I could have a meet-and-greet two days later. I figured I could probably get fifty people. It turned out we had a hundred and forty-eight. People overflowed to the porch.”
Warren described the scene to me: “It was incredibly hot. There were way too many people in this room. So the thing I have always hated is that I’m shouting, because they keep saying outside, ‘We can’t hear you!’ ”
At one point, someone asked Warren if she was engaging in class warfare. “No,” she said. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” For decades, American politicians, including many Democrats, had celebrated private enterprise and offered only tepid, almost apologetic endorsements of public goods. Here, in contrast, was Warren’s rousing defense of the welfare state.
Warren didn’t know that several people in Powell’s house were shooting video of the event. A few days later, one of them posted her answers on YouTube, and the video received nearly a million views. She declared her candidacy for the Senate seat now held by Scott Brown, the Republican who won a special election in 2010, after the death of Edward M. Kennedy. The Warren-Brown contest has become the highest-profile, and most expensive, statewide race of the year. The polls have been close for months, and the latest independent surveys show Brown leading. But if Warren wins she will help the Democrats continue to control the Senate, and her race will likely be seen as the overture to a run for President four years from now.
Warren’s viral video, as everyone calls it, is also playing a role in this fall’s White House contest. In Roanoke, Virginia, in July, President Obama appeared to paraphrase Warren’s comments, concluding, “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.” Republicans devoted most of the first day of the Republican Convention, in Tampa, to mocking Obama’s words. Also this summer, Brown’s campaign launched an online video about Warren’s statement, called “Let America Be America Again.” It has received even more hits on YouTube than Warren’s speech.
To a certain extent, the debate about Warren’s video turns on semantics. Brown and Mitt Romney acknowledge that businesses require schools, roads, and law enforcement in order to thrive. But Warren represents a genuine ideological challenge to Brown—and to her own party as well. She has drawn a rapturous response from liberal Democrats, including more than twenty-seven million dollars in campaign contributions, by far the most ever raised in a Massachusetts race. As she demonstrated in a fiery speech last week at the Democratic National Convention, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Warren is neither a Clintonesque triangulator nor an Obamaesque conciliator. She is a throwback to a more combative progressive tradition, and her candidacy is a test of whether that approach can still appeal to voters.
The city of Brockton is twenty-five miles from Harvard Square. In an unlovely strip mall, a few doors from a Dollar Tree store, the Warren campaign rented a storefront, one of thirty-five offices it has opened throughout Massachusetts. On a Tuesday night in July, Warren appeared for one of the “ice-cream socials” her campaign has been sponsoring around the state this summer. Almost three hundred people turned out in a thunderstorm to fill every folding chair and most of the space along the walls. Visitors were directed to sign-up sheets for door-to-door canvassing. Warren’s volunteers have knocked on four hundred thousand doors—a number said to be more than that of any other campaign in the history of Massachusetts.
Warren, who is a young-looking sixty-three, appeared precisely on time. She is a startling sight for anyone who has seen her only on television. She is tiny, and very slight. Her campaign uniform consists of colorful T-shirts topped by button-down shirts that flap behind her as she paces and talks. Her energy level is just short of manic. (Once, during a campaign swing through a Dunkin’ Donuts, I offered to buy her a cup of coffee. She declined, saying, “I once had half a cup, twenty years ago, and I’m still working it off.”) She tucked her blond pageboy behind her ears, adjusted her rimless glasses, and launched into a stump speech that is clearly informed by her years in the classroom. She’s a loud, lucid speaker, whose words unspool in full sentences and paragraphs.
“I talk a lot about working families,” Warren said. “I grew up in a working family.” As she invariably recites on the stump in Massachusetts, and as she told the delegates in Charlotte, her roots are modest. Warren’s father was a janitor; her mother took telephone orders at Sears. Her three older brothers all served in the military. “My oldest brother was career military—two hundred and eighty-eight combat missions in Vietnam,” she said, drawing applause in Brockton. “My second brother, John, when he got out of the military, he worked construction all his life. And I just want to say, he got ten good years as a crane operator in a union, and that’s why he has a pension today.” More applause. “My third brother, David, he was the one we always thought in the family had the special spark. David is the one who started a small business,” she said. “David could not imagine an America where he wasn’t out there every single day trying to live by his wits.
“I started working when I was nine,” Warren went on. “Family across the street had a new baby. New baby had colic. I was in business. For thirty-five cents an hour, I would have rocked that baby all night long.” Warren’s account might have left the impression that this all took place in Massachusetts, but she grew up in Oklahoma.
Warren’s own hold on middle-class life was tenuous at first. She married at nineteen, had her first child at twenty-two, and became a schoolteacher for special-needs children. On her daughter Amelia’s second birthday, Elizabeth started law school. It was difficult to find child care, she told the group in Brockton. “They would only take children who were dependably potty-trained,” she explained. “So I just want to say that I am here today courtesy of three bags of M&Ms. Think about it.” Raucous laughter.
The heart of Warren’s stump speech might be called a tale of two eras. “Here’s how I see the story,” she said. It started in the Great Depression. “In this hardest of times, what did we do? We looked into ourselves and we made a decision about what kind of people we are. We made a decision to invest in ourselves, invest in our kids, to invest in our future.” She described investments in education, in infrastructure (roads and bridges), and in research. “For half a century, that is exactly what we did. And we just watched it pay off. . . . Year over year, median family income—that family right in the middle—just kept going up with it.”
Warren continued, “Then, about thirty years ago, the country began to turn in another direction, and we had different leaders in Washington, and they told us another story about ourselves.” As it happened, this period marked a turning point in Warren’s life, too.
Warren graduated from the Rutgers School of Law, in Newark, in 1976, taught there for a couple of years, and then moved to the University of Houston, in 1978. (Two years later, she divorced her first husband.) Jay Westbrook, a professor at the University of Texas law school, in Austin, recalled, “A colleague saw her teach in Houston and thought she was great, and so she was invited to visit here in Austin, and ultimately she joined our faculty. By happy coincidence, Liz and I were both interested in the law in action, how it actually works in the real world. That’s kind of unusual for law professors, who tend to be more interested in theory and rules.”
In 1978, Congress had passed a major revision of the bankruptcy laws, and it went into effect the following year. Warren wondered how the new law was playing out, but she couldn’t find any reliable reports. “What I began to think about is nobody really knows what’s going on out there,” Warren told me. “So I started talking about: how would you find out?” Douglas Laycock, who taught the law of religion, suggested that she speak to his wife, Teresa Sullivan, a sociologist. Warren, Sullivan, and Westbrook had lunch together at a Mexican restaurant in Austin and decided to collaborate on a study of the new bankruptcy law. (Sullivan is now the president of the University of Virginia, where she recently survived an effort to unseat her.)
Warren spent about a decade searching through dusty records in Texas courthouses, and, along with Sullivan and Westbrook, she produced “As We Forgive Our Debtors,” a landmark book about consumer bankruptcy, in 1989. “What we found was very much counter to the conventional wisdom about bankruptcy,” Westbrook said. “Bankruptcy is a middle-class phenomenon. Previously, people had thought it was for day laborers and housemaids.” The leading causes were job loss and divorce. Illness and an inability to make mortgage payments were also prominent triggers. “We were way ahead of the curve on that one,” Westbrook said. “Too many people were stretched to the limit to buy as much house as they thought they could afford.” Warren conducted the research on the effects of housing and medical expenses on individuals’ decisions to declare bankruptcy.
“As We Forgive” recognizes the responsibility of debtors for creating some of their own problems, but it is unsparing in its assessment of how the financial industry preys on naïve consumers. “Credit card issuers were willing to give out the fifth, sixth, or seventh bank card and to approve charges after debtors already owed short-term debt so large that they could not possibly pay the interest, much less the principal,” the authors wrote. The trio collaborated on another book, “The Fragile Middle Class,” published in 2000, also relying on empirical research to demonstrate the precariousness of contemporary middle-class life. “Without universal health insurance to protect every family from the financial ravages of illness and without higher levels of unemployment compensation to cushion the effect of a layoff, each day, in good times and in bad, some families will fall over the financial edge,” they wrote.
Warren’s books are couched in academic prose, but the political content is unmistakable. The forces of capitalism, while often productive, are far from benign, especially at the top. As Warren told me, “So the first book says, ‘The system is being used the way that it should. Those people are in real trouble.’ Second book says, ‘And let’s tell you something about who those people are. They are surprisingly middle class.’ ” She went on, “The people who are filing for bankruptcy in increasing numbers every year, it’s not the poorest. It’s not the people at the economic fringes. It’s people who worked hard and played by the rules.” In front of the delegates in Charlotte, she put it this way: “For many years, our middle class has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered.”
The line from Warren’s academic work to the strip mall in Brockton is a direct one. As of 1980, she said in her speech, the “different leaders” in Washington “told us a story that said the job of government is not to help us make the investments together that none of us can make alone, that’s not the job—the job of government is to protect those who’ve already made it.
“Here’s what pulls me into this race,” she went on. “There are two visions for America and how to build that future. The Republicans have made their vision clear. They have said, ‘I got mine. The rest of you are on your own.’ . . . They said, ‘What we want to do is just cut taxes again for those who’ve already made it, leave more money for those who’ve already got it, cut regulations for those who are out there and building those successful businesses.’ ” She added, “What they say, in effect, is if you leave lots of money with the wealthiest and most powerful, the rest of you will be able to feed off the scraps. That’s their vision for how to build the future. That’s not our vision. It’s the wrong vision for America.”
Warren concluded with the story of a young man she had just met who said he had done everything he was told to do. He got good grades, stayed out of trouble, borrowed money to go to school—and he couldn’t find full-time work. He told Warren, “I’ve moved back in with my mom and dad, and I’m getting scared about whether there’s a future out there for me.” Warren said, “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m here because I’m looking for a fighter,’ and I said, ‘You found one.’ ”
While at Texas, Warren married Bruce Mann, a legal historian, and in 1987 they moved to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and then to Harvard Law School, in 1992. Warren continued to be an active scholar, but she was largely apolitical, and certainly not a public figure outside the academy. Then, in the mid-nineties, Congress decided to overhaul the bankruptcy laws for the first time since 1978, and President Clinton appointed Mike Synar, a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, to lead a commission to study the issue. Warren got a call from Synar, who asked her to be the adviser to the bankruptcy commission and help write its report and recommendations. Warren told me, “I said, ‘Not a chance. I am not doing this. No, it is politics.’ ” But it turned out that Synar had grown up near Warren in Oklahoma, and they had debated against each other in high school. Promised independence, Warren signed on.
As she describes it, this was where her real political education began. In 1997, the commission filed its report, which more or less reflected the findings of “As We Forgive Our Debtors.” As Warren later wrote, the commission “reaffirmed that the bankruptcy laws were, for the most part, working as Congress had originally intended: to offer families a fresh start in the wake of financial and personal disaster.” But the financial industry, especially the credit-card companies, wanted big changes in the law, all designed to make it more difficult for consumers to void their debts.
The bankruptcy wars, as Warren calls them, stretched on for a decade. In her telling, many senior Democrats ultimately joined the Republicans in betraying the middle class. In “The Two Income Trap,” a book she co-wrote with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi, Warren describes briefing Hillary Clinton, when she was First Lady, about the bankruptcy bill backed by the financial industry. “It’s our job to stop that awful bill,” Warren quotes Clinton as saying. But several years later, when the bill came up for passage, Senator Clinton voted for it. “The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not,” Warren wrote. As a senator, “she could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn’t coming from families in financial trouble.” When the bill finally passed, in 2005, then-Senator Joseph Biden was one of its biggest backers. “Senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening,” Warren wrote.
In October of 2008, Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, named Warren to the panel overseeing the bank bailouts, known as TARP. Neil Barofsky served as the inspector general for oversight of the bailouts. “She was Harry Reid’s pick for the TARP oversight board,” Barofsky told me. “It was a bit politicized, and I think there was a real question mark going into the change of Administrations about whether, once Obama and Geithner took over”—Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary—“she would be as aggressive as she had been. That question was very swiftly answered, because she was still a relentless advocate for the taxpayer.”
At the TARP oversight hearings, in 2009 and 2010, the targets of Warren’s plainspoken questions were mostly Obama Administration officials, notably Geithner. Warren argued that the taxpayers had bailed out the big financial institutions without demanding any accountability from them—and even without knowing where the bailout money went. “A.I.G. has received about seventy billion dollars in TARP money, about a hundred billion dollars in loans from the Fed,” she said to Geithner at one point. “Do you know where the money went?” (His reply was vague.)
Warren’s interpretation of the bailouts fit into her larger narrative of post-1980 American politics, which doesn’t spare the Democrats, who were in charge for much of that period. “A deregulated financial-services industry, over this next thirty-year period, begins to figure out a different consumer-lending model,” she told me. “Some of the largest financial institutions can build a profit model on tricking people.” Credit-card companies can mislead their customers about the true interest rates they are paying; mortgage lenders can trick borrowers into refinancings that are likely, in time, to lead to foreclosures. “It’s not a story of one side wants government and the other side doesn’t,” she said. “This is a story about how government gets used. Government gets used to protect those who have already made it. That becomes the game. And so we had the big crash, and I thought, O.K.! We tested the alternative theory. Cut taxes, reduce regulations and financial services, and see what happens to the economy. We ran a thirty-year test on that and it was a disaster.” Warren made the point even more bluntly in Charlotte: “The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in profits. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. And Wall Street C.E.O.s—the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.”
Warren’s scrutiny of the Obama Treasury Department presented a delicate challenge for her. At the same time that she was investigating Treasury, she was also helping Barney Frank, the Massachusetts congressman, and others write the legislation that became the Dodd-Frank bill. She pushed for the creation of a consumer-protection agency, to police the kinds of practice that she had criticized in her scholarly work: deceptive credit-card bills, home mortgages with misleading terms.
As Barofsky recounts in his book, “Bailout,” it was common knowledge both that Warren wanted to head the consumer agency and that Geithner would play a major role in naming its first leader. Still, Warren kept pressuring Geithner, even embarrassing him in public. She was particularly scathing about the difficulties of the Administration’s program to help homeowners avoid foreclosures. “We only have three months left with hundreds of thousands of families facing foreclosure,” Warren told Geithner at one hearing. “Is it time to rethink whether or not a mortgage-foreclosure-prevention program that is based on a group of servicers whom you describe as having done a ‘terrible job’ is a program that perhaps should be redesigned?” Warren’s questioning of Geithner was, according to Barofsky, “a remarkably principled act, the exact opposite of what any other person in Washington angling for a high-profile job would have done.”
The more enemies Warren made in the capital, the more popular she became elsewhere. For better or worse, she did not talk like most politicians. “My first choice is a strong consumer agency,” she told the Huffington Post. “My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.” This kind of talk doomed her chances of being appointed to run the consumer agency but endeared her to, among others, Jon Stewart. (Once, on “The Daily Show,” Stewart said to Warren, “I know your husband’s backstage, I still wanna make out with you.”)
In time, the Senate race in Massachusetts began to look attractive for a number of reasons. Warren’s populist appeal made her the Democrats’ best chance of winning back the seat, and the campaign would get Warren out of the Administration’s hair for the rest of Obama’s term. In February, 2011, Barney Frank attended a Democratic issues conference with Jim Ready, who is now his husband. “Jim and I were getting our picture taken with the President,” Frank said to me. “I told him that he really ought to appoint Elizabeth to run the consumer agency. I said, either she’ll get through the Senate and do a great job or the Republicans will stop her, make a hero out of her, and then she can go back to Massachusetts and run for the Senate. And Obama said to me, ‘Do you think she really wants to run for the Senate?’ And I said, ‘Mr. President, I think she might want to run for your job, but she has to start somewhere.’ ”
On August 15th, Scott Brown walked into a textile factory, on a desolate corner in Boston, with the lumbering gait of an ex-athlete. As Downtown Scotty Brown, he had been the star of the Tufts basketball team, Class of 1981. The following year, when he was a student at Boston College Law School, he won Cosmopolitan’s “America’s Sexiest Man” contest. Today, at fifty-two, he competes in triathlons and, as he likes to say, “takes a lot of Aleve.” At the factory lectern, he received the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose spokesman said of Warren, “No other candidate presents such a threat to the free-enterprise system.”
Brown is a reassuring, if not exactly dynamic, presence. He speaks softly, and he doesn’t put on airs. His trademark, during his 2010 race for the Senate, was a beat-up pickup truck, in which he drove across the state. He has served for more than thirty years in the National Guard. His wife, Gail Huff, was a longtime local news reporter in the Boston area, and one of his two daughters was a semifinalist on “American Idol.” Allies and adversaries acknowledge Brown’s likability as critical to his political appeal. “The extraordinary thing is the growth on Scott Brown’s part,” William Weld, the former Massachusetts governor, who supports Brown, told me. “He’s comfortable in his own skin. He relates to people.”
Like Warren, Brown is a national figure, and he owes his prominence to his upset victory, two years ago, in the Senate race over Martha Coakley, the commonwealth’s attorney general. When Kennedy died, on August 25, 2009, most observers believed that Democrats had a lock on the seat. But the election, on January 19, 2010, took place at a low moment in the Obama Presidency. The economy was not recovering quickly, and the President’s health-care plan was bogged down in Congress. Tea Party partisans from around the country rushed into the state to campaign for Brown. Coakley’s ineptitude as a candidate has by now assumed the air of legend. She took a vacation three weeks before Election Day; she publicly disparaged the notion of campaigning by shaking hands at Fenway Park. Still, Brown won the race as much as Coakley lost it. “That was situational. I was up there with him at the end,” Weld said. “That was huge spending fatigue and tax fatigue with Obama, and Scott was going to be the forty-first vote against health care. It was him against the world, which is an attractive place to be in the political world.”
Despite the state’s reputation for liberalism, Republicans have often done well in Massachusetts. No Democrat was elected governor between Michael Dukakis, in 1986, and Deval Patrick, in 2006. Moderate Republicans like Weld and the early Mitt Romney thrived in this era, and Brown is squarely in this tradition. As Weld says, “He’s quite clearly a Massachusetts Republican, not a national Republican.” Brown has made several high-profile departures from his party’s orthodoxy. He voted to pass the Dodd-Frank financial reform, to approve the START treaty with Russia, and to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. On other issues, Brown tries to straddle. Massachusetts has had same-sex marriage longer than any other state, and Brown will say only that the issue is “settled.”
Because Brown is a key figure in the Republicans’ attempt to take control of the Senate, Warren tries to tie him to the national G.O.P. In Boston, Warren had been taking every opportunity to link Brown to Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman and Vice-Presidential nominee. Brown repeated several times that he had voted twice against Ryan’s budget. “I know Professor Warren would love to run against Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, but unfortunately she’s running against me,” he said. “Professor Warren believes the answer lies in bigger and bigger government. And she believes that no one succeeds on their own.”
I asked Brown about Warren’s view that no one succeeds on his or her own. “The idea that success in business is nothing more than a by-product of government is to fundamentally misunderstand our free-enterprise system,” he told me. Unlike Warren, Brown said, he was a conciliator. “A good idea is a good idea no matter where it comes from,” he said. “I’m not a rock thrower. I’m not going to leave blood and teeth on the floor.” As David Axelrod, President Obama’s chief strategist (and a former media consultant for Deval Patrick), told me, “If you were to sum the race up, he is trying to make a cultural connection with white middle-class voters in Massachusetts, and Warren is making a strong economic appeal to those same voters based on her lifelong work and personal story.”
When Warren was six or seven, in Oklahoma City, she told me, “I said to my mother, ‘What did your wedding dress look like? Tell me about your wedding dress.’
“And my mother stiffened up and said, ‘I didn’t have one,’ ” Warren went on. “I couldn’t imagine how you couldn’t have one. And I couldn’t leave this alone and I could remember asking—even though you’re asking something that’s going to upset your mother—so I’d ask again and I’d wait a while and I’d say, ‘So, was Aunt Bea your maid of honor, or was Aunt Max your maid of honor, or did you pick Aunt Alice?’ Because she had these three sisters and I thought, What a quandary! What a problem! How do you pick? And she said, none of them. And finally my mother said to me, ‘Your Daddy and I loved each other very, very much, but we couldn’t get married, so we ran away and got married, and we didn’t have our family with us.’ ”
The family story, as it emerged over the years, was that opposition from Warren’s father’s family prompted her parents to elope. She told me, “So my parents were very much in love, they wanted to get married, and my father’s mother and father said, ‘No. You cannot marry her, because she is part Cherokee and part Delaware.’ ”
In April, the Boston Herald broke the story that Harvard Law School had over the years described Warren as Native American, in an effort to show the diversity of its faculty. Warren was nervous and defensive in response. She acknowledged her distant roots, but said that she had never used her status to get hired for any job; she had provided the information on her background to Harvard after she joined the faculty. She also acknowledged that she listed herself as Native American in law-school directories. The Boston press, especially the tabloid Herald, revelled in her misadventure. “When Fauxcahontas Warren was caught embellishing her background for personal gain, she did not apologize or accept responsibility,” Holly Robichaud, a Republican strategist and sometime columnist, wrote in the paper this spring. “She continues unfazed on the warpath against U.S. Sen. Scott Brown.”
It seems clear that Warren did not benefit from any affirmative action for Native Americans at Harvard. Charles Fried, a longtime law professor at Harvard and the Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration, presented the case for hiring Warren to the faculty, in the nineteen-nineties. “Neither in the discussion in the appointments committee or in the faculty did the subject of her Native American roots come up,” Fried told me. “I did not know it.” It remains unclear whether the controversy hurt Warren. The polls didn’t move much. In certain precincts, there may have been a pro-Warren backlash. One day, when Warren was campaigning in Roxbury, a largely African-American neighborhood, she was accompanied by Tito Jackson, a Boston city councillor. “People of color don’t get jobs because they are people of color,” Jackson told me. “We have to work harder to get jobs. That whole thing is bull.”
Still, Brown is a skillful campaigner, and his supporters have kept the story alive—as a useful proxy for the issue of social class, much as he invariably refers to his opponent as Professor Warren. The 2012 race may come down to arithmetic as much as to politics. In the 2010 special election, Brown received some 1.1 million votes, about fifty-two per cent of the approximately 2.3 million cast. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama received about sixty-two per cent of three million votes cast in Massachusetts. John McCain received 1.1 million votes, almost exactly the same number as Brown did two years later. Assuming a similar turnout in the current Presidential year, there will be about seven hundred thousand voters whom Brown has never faced, and they all voted for Obama. Brown’s supporters recognize this problem.
The closest parallel to the Brown-Warren race came in 1996, when Weld, the incumbent governor, challenged John Kerry’s reëlection to the Senate. “Ten days before the election, we were even in the polls,” Weld recalled. “But his advertising succeeded in nationalizing the race. I ran twenty-five points ahead of Bob Dole, but I still lost by eight.” Brown has already proved deft at distinguishing himself from the national party. He was the first senator to call on Todd Akin to leave the Missouri Senate race after his remarks on rape; a few days before the Republican Convention, Brown publicly announced his disagreement with the anti-abortion plank in the party platform. Still, as Axelrod said, “Brown’s Romney problem in Massachusetts is that Romney sold himself as one thing and now he’s completely sold out to the right, and the Ryan selection is the latest in that evolution. Brown is trying to pull the same bait and switch.”
So far, the campaign has been, by contemporary standards, high-minded. Brown and Warren agreed to discourage Super PAC commercials in the state, and none have appeared. Neither candidate has yet run a negative television advertisement. Still, the contrast between them is stark. Warren is the first candidate since Obama to generate real enthusiasm in the Democratic base, but she did it differently from the way he did. She makes no gauzy promises of hope and change, and she wades into conflict rather than trying to rise above it. She is a candidate of, and for, hard times. “The people who broke the economy fought the regulations and then doubled down,” she told me. “So now here we are, we’re in this election of 2012, and it’s right there on the table: What is the role of government?” ♦
