Ousting Warren Step 1: Falling In Love
In order to stop Warren, you have to figure out why she is so popular to begin with. In order to isolate her, you have to fall in love with her first.
Did you know I used to like Elizabeth Warren? It is quite surprising. I have never liked any of her policy stances, but I deeply resonated with her story and rise to power.
In order to beat someone, you have to understand what their strengths are. For a politician, one of their best strengths is their back story. Many voters may have no clue what a persons policy stance is and what they are voting on, but they do understand what they see and hear on TV, especially local TV.
A politicians job is to make you fall in love with them. Like political Stockholm Syndrome, whether the politician really is fighting for you or not, if voters love you, no matter what the narrative, they will stick by you.
So, are you ready to date Elizabeth Warren?
Biography
Elizabeth Warren was born to a working class family on June 22, 1949 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Warren grew up in the suburb of Norman, Oklahoma, where her father worked mainly as a maintenance man and her mother did catalog-order work. After her father suffered a heart attack, the family struggled economically, and Warren began waiting tables at age 13.
This first paragraph alone makes Warren relatable. Starting from humble working class means is the key to any average voters heart. “I also grew up in a lower to middle class home.”
At age 16 she earned a debate scholarship and attended George Washington University, Washington, D.C., though she graduated from the University of Houston (B.S. in speech pathology, 1970).
She had married her high-school sweetheart, mathematician Jim Warren, at age 19 and moved to Texas; they had two children but divorced in 1978. After the divorce she worked as a special education teacher, she earned a law degree (1976) from Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, practiced law out of her living room, and then embarked on a career as a law-school professor that eventually took her to Harvard University.
Warren’s struggle as a single mother is a large talking point of hers. With divorce rates in America at an all time high, it makes her even more likeable. However, you will notice a slight narrative shift. Warren gets accepted into Harvard.
Along the way, she became an expert on bankruptcy law. In 1980 Warren married Harvard legal scholar Bruce Mann.
Warren getting remarried furthers her appeal. Studies show that married politicians do better than single ones. She has all the struggles of a single mother, but all the wholesomeness of being a married woman.
Warren testified before congressional committees about financial matters affecting Americans, a topic that she wrote about in a number of books, including The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (2000) and The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (2003).
It was as the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the body authorized under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to rescue foundering American financial institutions in 2008, that Warren became a national figure. She then championed the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was established under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Warrens sudden rise should shock you. Her entry into Harvard excellerated her political career. Her two published books were precursurs to her campaign platform. Both of them focused on a specific target market. You’ll notice the exact target just based on the titles.
As interim director, Warren structured and staffed the bureau tasked with protecting people from financial fraud and chicanery, but she was not nominated as its permanent head by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, who, according to some, feared that Republicans would block her appointment. Nevertheless, Warren had become a populist bellwether and a liberal icon, celebrated by talk-show hosts Jon Stewart and Bill Maher.
In 2011 Warren began seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy before his death. She captured nearly 96 percent of the votes at the party’s state convention and thereby avoided a primary election.
Warren campaigned as a defender of the embattled middle class. She confounded accusations of Harvard elitism with her down-to-earth personality and argued the benefits of good government, confronting her Republican opponents advocacy of rugged individualism with her contention that every entrepreneur had benefited from public works and from employees well educated in public schools. After Warren was accused of having misrepresented herself as being of partly Native American descent (which she could not formally document), she explained that her identification as partly Cherokee and Delaware came by way of family stories.
In the November 2012 election, Warren defeated Brown; upon taking office in January 2013, she became the first woman to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate.
Power Changes People
Warren’s story is certainly inspirational in many ways. I was raised by a single mother for part of my life, and a single farther the other part. Seeing both my parents struggle individually to raise 6 kids certainly had its harsh moments. Seeing Warren come from a working class family like mine, raising two kids as a single mother, and managing to working her way to the top of the United States political ladder is incredibly inspirational.
So, how does a working class single mother rise to the top and become such an elitest? The simplest answer: Harvard.
Warrens years at Harvard, the marriage of her husband Bruce Mann who was also a Harvard Professor, and her other Ivy League pursuits at University of Pennsylvania, all marked a notable change in her policy stances and her network.
Well networked in the Ivy Leagues, the publications of Warren’s books furthered her political connections by getting her in front of major media outlets all over the United States.
Between her Ivy League and Media connections it is no wonder she was brought into the political fold by being chosen to serve as the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel and soon after being chosen by Obama to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Initially a rebel and fighter, Warren had made her way into the arms of the most elite institutions in the United States: Ivy League Universities, the Media, and the Administrative State (under Congress and Obama’s White House).
The old Warren whom we could all fall in love with, the working class single mother who wanted nothing but the best for her children and society, had all but died somewhere in those Harvard University halls. Now with promises of power, prestige, and notoriety the new Warren would be born, ready to do anything to fight those whom used to love her the most: the working class.
The Power of Story
Warren is still immensely popular. The old Warren still lives strong in the hearts of her Massachusetts voters.
What is most important however is that you now understand the narrative you are fighting. You are fighting someone that is actually very well liked in her State, and throughout broad sections of the country.
It does not matter how much you dislike her as a person, or realize how elitest her policies may be. In order to beat her, you have to understand why voters like her.
Now that you understand her very basic appeal, its time to construct a new narrative. One that shows that the old Warren, the one which most voters fell in love with, no longer exists.
It time to have a voter intervention, and show her voters that the New Warren is not their friend.