Why Elizabeth Warren Needs to Give 'The Speech'

Warren could do the same for hers with one on her life story. She’s damaged goods, this line of thinking goes, no matter how great her ideas are.In response to this skepticism, some suggest that Warren’s best (and perhaps only) option is to stay away from her past and lock away her family stories, and instead focus her campaign entirely on her attacks on the 1 percent and her proposals for structural economic reforms. I think Elizabeth Warren, a wonky white female lawyer, a U.S. senator and an emeritus professor at the most prestigious university in America, an intellectual whose “save-capitalism-from-the-oligarchs” passion at one time made her the leader of “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party,” should tie her Oklahoma history and her life story and her ideology all together. Yet during these same years, her party was rebuilt along small-government and Christian conservative lines—mostly, as an interesting parallel, by the descendants of white farmers who fled the bankruptcy, poverty, and near starvation they faced in Oklahoma during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, and built new lives for themselves in California, a generation before Warren was born. Both showed in great detail how the loosening of banking regulations and the shift away from an industrial economy made consumer spending and debt central to middle-class life, and how damaging the effects of this change were to those who simply wanted to hold on to the sort of life which, 30 years before, Warren was raised to believe was expected. But still, it’s the sort of story that, were it packaged into a campaign speech, could bring the dreams and resentments and hopes and fears of tens of millions of white American middle-class women along with it, exposing their concerns and desires to a probably discomforting light—but also, perhaps, casting them in a new one.I don’t expect this to happen.