Steven Senne/AP Photo
Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks to the media outside her home, March 5, 2020, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after dropping out of the Democratic presidential race.
Earlier today, the candidate who would have made the best president of the United States ended her candidacy. If the Democrats held the House and took the Senate, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren would have been the most effective progressive president since LBJ or FDR, with a more creative and firmer grip on policy than either. For that matter, she would have been a more effective social democratic president than Bernie Sanders, for I don’t doubt she could have worked the levers of power to promote initiatives they both support better than he could.
Unfortunately, Warren wasn’t the most compelling candidate, save to the stratum of the electorate who relished her progressive policy chops. Her persona—the professor, the teacher—proved off-putting to many working-class men of all races. She and her campaign could have, and should have, highlighted her other persona—the hardscrabble Oklahoma young woman who by dint of relentless hard work made something of herself. Bill Clinton, after all, was a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law grad, but chose to run as the kid from Hope, Arkansas. As Warren’s candidate identity took shape during the campaign, in both paid and free media, she was much more the Harvard Prof than the Oklahoma Kid. That didn’t play out very well.
Should we wish to play the what-if game, it’s interesting to speculate how she would have done had Bernie Sanders elected not to run this year, or how she’d have done if she’d run against Hillary Clinton in 2016 (Sanders has said he wouldn’t have run then if she did). As a candidate of a rising and consolidated left, and with less ideological baggage than Bernie, she might have gone all the way—though I’m still not sure she could have overcome the misogyny that always hampered her generally, and the anti-female-professor-lecturing-you bias in particular. Either way, then or now, in 2016 or 2020, she would have to have run as that Oklahoma Kid. Too bad she didn’t.
