A vote for Elizabeth Warren

By Rick Holmes

Feb. 3, 2020

I used to interview and endorse candidates for a living. Over more than 30 years in the newspaper business, I vetted more candidates than I can count, running for everything from school board to president of the United States.

I’d typically ask the candidates why they were running, and I noticed they fell into two types. Some candidates answered by talking about themselves: how they were called to serve, why this is a good time for them to run and a good office for them to seek. Others spoke first of what they wanted to do: the problems they wanted to solve, the people they wanted to help or, in a few cases, the ideologies they wanted to promote.

In terms of this year’s race for the Democratic nomination, I’d put Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Mike Bloomberg and Deval Patrick in the first category. They want the job and the responsibility. They believe life has prepared them to handle the Oval Office inbox. Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang seem ego-driven as well, despite Steyer’s record of organizing and Yang’s bright ideas.

I’d put Bernie Sanders in the second category. He has dedicated his life to causes, to helping people screwed by the system, to giving voice to an ideology at odds with the mainstream of both political parties. His career has never been about Bernie, or at least it wasn’t before 2016.

Elizabeth Warren is also in it more for the mission than the fame. I’ve followed Warren’s career closely, covered her speeches, read her books, and grilled her in editorial board meetings. I’ve been impressed every time.

Warren discovered what she wanted to fix long before she thought about running for office. Her understanding of the pressures on the middle class starts with her own childhood in Oklahoma. When her father had a heart attack and lost his job, her family nearly lost everything. She persisted, through community college, a failed first marriage and the trials of a single mother trying to build a career – a story she uses to excellent effect on the campaign trail. She became an expert on bankruptcy by doing something academics had previously not bothered to do: She read and analyzed thousands of personal bankruptcy filings in cities across the U.S. She went into the project looking for data reflecting the view of bankruptcy filers common in the financial industry: that they were reckless borrowers and irresponsible spenders unwilling to pay their debts. Instead, she found the vast majority of families had fallen into bankruptcy because middle class economics put ordinary folks perpetually on the edge of insolvency. A single family crisis – divorce, a medical setback, the death of a breadwinner – pushed them off the cliff. She concluded that their predicament was a logical outgrowth of predatory practices of the financial services industry, exacerbated by social and governmental policies that had raised the cost of education, child care and health care beyond the means of middle class families.

Warren went from being a bankruptcy expert to an advocate for economic and political reform. She went to Washington to fight an industry-backed bankruptcy “reform” bill that would just make things even harder on struggling families. She lost – to Joe Biden, as it happened, who was the lead promoter of the industry-backed bill – but she got a lesson in how it’s not just the bankruptcy system that’s rigged, it’s politics as well.

I first came to know Warren through her books, especially “The Two-Income Trap,” written with her daughter, explaining America’s changing family economics. Years later, when I wrote an editorial encouraging her to challenge Sen. Scott Brown, I voiced reservations. She’d never run for anything. I wondered if she could stand to shake the thousands of hands, in coffee shops and living rooms from Pittsfield to Provincetown, if she could connect with people who’d never come close to Harvard. It turns out Warren is good in living rooms. Her “pay it forward” defense of progressive values in an Andover home in 2011 became a viral video sensation, and the rest is history, now still being written.

Another thing I learned through the years of evaluating candidates and watching presidents is that the ideological spectrum is a poor guide for measuring leaders. Activists and pundits fall into this assumption that politics is two-dimensional, that candidates can be placed on a line running from left to right based on policy, progressive on one end, conservative on the other. For one thing, most voters don’t think that way, especially those all-important swing voters. They are swayed by temperament, emotional connection and narratives. More important, the ideological lens ignores qualities that are vital to political success: intellect, experience, knowledge, empathy, open-mindedness, discipline and moral courage. The fact that Donald Trump is so devoid of these qualities makes it even more critical that his Democratic opponent have them.

An editorial board endorsement is more like a hiring process than a popularity contest. I want someone who can do the job. Several of the Democrats running this time have the skills needed to be president. Here’s the case for Warren: She’s a master of public policy, with the plans to prove it. She knows which buttons to push, with or without help from Congress, to achieve her goals. She’s long been recognized as a great teacher, which is part of being an effective leader. Her executive experience is limited, but she earned high grades, even from her critics in the Obama Administration, for her work creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She’s data-driven, say those who know her, and not locked into the DC policy establishment. She’s open to new ideas. She is as smart as they come. And she’s in nobody’s pocket.

Nobody pays me to write endorsements these days. There’s long been an argument over whether newspapers should endorse at all, and whether endorsements make a difference, especially in a presidential race, especially today. Today, what matters is social media, they say. So I’ll just post this to social media.

I believe any Democrat can defeat Donald Trump, and I’ll vote for whoever they put on the ballot. In the primary, I’m voting for the candidate I believe is most capable of being a great president once Trump’s gone. That candidate is Elizabeth Warren.