A Fighting Chance

Okay, I confess—the marauding bands was a little over the top. But I hoped the basic point came through: Without police, schools, roads, firefighters, and all the rest, where would those big corporations and “self-made” billionaires be? For capitalism to work, we all need one another.

When I first saw the video a few weeks after that Andover house party, I winced. My arms were all over the place, and it sounded like I was shouting. (Well, I was shouting, hoping the people standing out on the porch could hear me.) Not a very polished speech, but it would have to do.

I decided that if a surprise video of one of my appearances was going to get out, this wasn’t so bad. I hadn’t sat down to plot it out, but it was a pretty good statement about why I was running for the Senate. I wanted this race to be about the question at the heart of the video: How do we build a future? I made the case for what I believe: We are stronger and wealthier because of the things we build together. We are more secure when we create a foundation that allows each of us to have a decent chance to build something on our own. We are better off when we invest in one another. It’s economics and values, tied tightly together.

A lot of people got excited about the video and sent around the link. Pretty soon there were more than a million views on YouTube. Moveon.org posted the clip under the headline THE ELIZABETH WARREN QUOTE EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO SEE. The Street said I “was able to articulate—in a few words—what the Democratic Party has been unable to communicate for years.” (Wow—that was kind of depressing.) A Business Insider column called it “sheer political brilliance.” (Really? That made it sound as if the video were part of some grand strategy instead of totally unplanned.)

Before I could begin to imagine that I had some instinctive understanding of how to run for office, however, the conservatives swung into action. Fox News aired the clip and brought on a commentator who declared some of my words “not true” and “patently silly.” Rush Limbaugh jumped in and called me “a parasite who hates her host … [and is] willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.… This is the thinking behind Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.”

Whoa. Two minutes of off-the-cuff remarks about deficit reduction and how the wealthy should pay a little more in taxes, and suddenly I’m a parasite who hates her host? My campaign was off to quite a start.

The big banks kept a low profile at first, but before long they started weighing in against my campaign, too. One executive was quoted as saying: “It’s not even about Scott Brown.… It’s about: Do you want Elizabeth Warren in the Senate?” The answer came quickly: Wall Street bankers sent out “urgent appeals” to raise money for Scott Brown.

Wall Street’s response probably didn’t have anything to do with the video clip. The big banks had made up their minds about me long ago, and for good reason—they knew where I stood on financial reform. The election was a long way off, and already these guys were in all-out assault mode. I knew that a super-motivated Wall Street was much more dangerous than a blathering Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh could talk (and talk and talk), but the bankers had something a lot more powerful—endless buckets of money to throw into elections.

The campaign was just getting started, but already I felt like I was on the Tilt-A-Whirl ride at the carnival. Rush Limbaugh? Big-deal bankers who were squeezing their well-heeled friends to send money to Scott Brown? What was I in for?





Keep Your Clothes On

Before I could run against Scott Brown, I had to win the nomination of my own party. Five other Democrats had already thrown their hats in the ring. A debate was set up for October 4 at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell.

By that time, I had officially announced that I was a candidate for office. I had also found a terrific campaign manager, Mindy Myers, an experienced hand who had run two successful Senate campaigns. She was calm and steady and had great judgment, a perfect counterbalance to my damn-the-torpedoes-full-steam-ahead tendencies. Mindy brought organization and enormous savvy to the campaign. In addition, for her deputy she brought in Tracey Lewis, another experienced and coolly efficient pro who had done some great work on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.