Electable by Ali Vitali

Author:Ali Vitali [Vitali, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

9

Nevada

Going Down Swinging

February 2020

This is the kick in the ass they needed,” a Warren ally told me as her New Hampshire Not-So-Victory Party cleared out and the reality of just how poorly she was doing sunk in.

It was without joy that this person shared this assessment—and very unlike my days covering the Trump campaign, when staffers relished backstabbing each other in the press and trying to play armchair psychoanalyst to the candidate himself in the pages of The New York Times. No, in Warren World they believed deeply that their candidate should become president—but that she desperately needed to change things up if she had any hope of actually doing so.

New Hampshire’s fourth place was an embarrassment, given Warren’s status as the Senator Next Door in Massachusetts. But it was also an additional sign of how her campaign’s early-state strategy had fallen flat. The truth was, they needed more than a kick in the ass. They needed to pull a rabbit out of a hat and then have that rabbit pull a rabbit out of its hat. But with rabbits and hats scarce, the team and the candidate settled for a change of strategy—one that was soon evident to all of us who’d spent the last year following her.

Warren rose to national prominence as Warren the Fighter but did relatively little combat with her rivals during her 2020 campaign for president. She gaggled with us, her traveling press corps, almost daily, but when we would try to bait her into contrasting herself with her rivals in the field, she typically balked, dodged, and shook her head in the name of not going there. She wouldn’t alienate any potential voters, a strategy initially built with Iowa’s ranked-choice caucus system in mind.

That’s not to say there weren’t moments of contrast, even ones that got a little feisty in their delivery. But they tended to be steeped in some larger policy principles, like an irritation at candidates who pressed for what she saw as too-slow, incremental policy change or rivals who were using the traditional fundraising apparatuses that leaned heavily on big-dollar donors, bundlers, and PACs.

Usually, these moments of contrast came on the debate stage. Sometimes—like in Detroit in July 2019 when she took down Congressman John Delaney for attacking her “fairytale economics” and progressive ideas—Warren’s precision on the debate stage was applauded.

“You know,” she said then, “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”

In December 2019—two months after Buttigieg helped lay bare her lack of a healthcare plan and her unwillingness, or inability, to answer whether her plan would raise taxes on the middle class—she turned up the heat on Mayor Pete over a fundraiser he held in a Swarovski crystal–adorned, Napa Valley wine cave.

“We made the decision many years ago that rich people in smoke-filled rooms would not pick the next president of the United States,” Warren said on that debate stage.

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