I have no idea if Warren will actually win the nomination, but she’s proven to be much, much better at this than many people claimed after she announced late last year. https://t.co/3SrHZ9iGBz
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) August 3, 2019
I wrote a feature about Elizabeth Warren’s teaching career—how it shapes her, helps us understand her approach to politics, what her students thought about her, how she proposed to her husband in a classroom, how her dog used to have office hours: https://t.co/5MlQCaU0HX
— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) August 6, 2019
Rebecca Traister, in NYMag:
… Warren’s work as a teacher — the profession she dreamed of from the time she was in second grade — remains a crucial part of her identity, self-presentation, and communicative style. Her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance, opens with these sentences: “I’m Elizabeth Warren. I’m a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. For nearly all my life, I would have said I’m a teacher, but I guess I really can’t say that anymore.”
But just because she’s not in the classroom these days doesn’t mean that those she’s talking to can’t smell it on her from a mile away. Leading up to the first round of debates, the Onion ran a headline reading, “Elizabeth Warren Spends Evenings Tutoring Underperforming Candidates.” And during a June episode of Desus & Mero, the two Bronx hosts did a riff on how Warren “definitely gives you teacher swag, but the teacher-that-cares-a-lot swag,” imagining her being the kind of teacher who comes to your house to tell your mom you have potential. “You came all the way to the Bronx for this? Wow … that blanquita cares.”
Warren has won multiple teaching awards, and when I first profiled her in 2011, early in her Senate run and during what would be her last semester of teaching at Harvard, I spoke to students who were so over the moon about her that my editors decided I could not use many of their quotes because they were simply too laudatory. Many former students I interviewed for this story spoke in similarly soaring terms. One, Jonas Blank, described her as “patient and plainspoken, like an elementary-school teacher is expected to be, but also intense and sharp the way a law professor is supposed to be.” Several former students who are now (and were then) Republicans declined to talk to me on the record precisely because they liked her so much and did not want to contribute to furthering her political prospects by speaking warmly of her.
Yet it remains an open question whether the work Warren does so very well — the profession about which she is passionate and that informs her approach to politics — will work for her on the presidential-campaign trail.
Plenty of our former presidents have been teachers. Some of them, including William Howard Taft and Barack Obama, taught law; some, including Millard Fillmore, primary school. Warren has been both law professor and primary-school teacher, and as a person who ran for office for the first time in her 60s, her four decades as a teacher define her in a way Obama’s stint as an instructor in constitutional law never did. Here, as in all else, it matters that she’s a woman. Teaching is a profession that, in post-agrarian America, was explicitly meant to be filled by women. That means teachers historically were some of the only women to wield certain kinds of public power: They could evaluate and punish, and so it was easy to resent them…
When I asked Warren whether these are dynamics she worries about, she answered with an emphatic no: “Nobody wants to be talked down to — nobody. That’s true whether we’re talking about big national audiences or law students or fifth-graders or little tiny kids.” But, she said, this is not at all at odds with the work she has done as an educator, because “that’s not what teaching, good teaching, is about.”Instead, she said, “good teaching is about starting where you are and the teacher having the confidence in you to know that if you had a little bit more information, a little bit more time on this, if you thought about this from a little different perspective, you might move a little bit.”…
*****
When I asked Warren about her wooing of progressive students into her own traditionally more staid field, she rubbed her hands together, a cheerful spider in full command of her web. She told me a story about how she performed the same trick with Katie Porter, a student who flubbed an early answer in class, came to beg Warren not to give up on her, and blurted out, “I don’t care about any of this bankruptcy stuff!” Porter not only went on to study bankruptcy with Warren; she wound up teaching it as a professor and, in 2018, flipped an Orange County California House seat blue. Warren wants progressives, she said, “armed with maces and spears and sticks” in their fights for economic equality. Porter now performs viral eviscerations of bankers and bureaucrats on the House floor, reminiscent of what her mentor does in the Senate…But there’s another student of Warren’s who now sits alongside her in the Senate: the bloodred Tom Cotton from Arkansas. Cotton once told Chuck Todd that, while he knew from her scholarship that she was a liberal, he hadn’t been able to divine her politics in class.
Warren and Cotton appeared together at a 2017 panel at Harvard for senators associated with the school (at which Warren was the only woman and the only panelist without a Harvard degree in the all-white group). During the discussion, Warren was describing why she’d come to teach at Harvard, how “every day I got to walk into the classroom where [there was] such privilege, such opportunity, such incredible tools, but to say to people, ‘Come on, get better at what you’ve got and widen it out, because the only mistake you can make is not to get out there and do something with passion.’”
Cotton interrupted her: “That’s not exactly the way I remember it,” he deadpanned, explaining that “she was teaching us that lesson by being very hard on us.”
Warren leaned over and looked at her former student. “And are you sorry?” she asked him.
Cotton backed down. “She was probably the best professor I had,” he conceded…
As one can expect from Traisster, the whole piece is packed with great anecdotes. There’s a link to a podcast interview, too, if you’re interested.
“Warren has put critics of her grand plans on the defensive in much the same way Barack Obama put Hillary Clinton on the defensive in 2008, when she argued that Obama's plans were fantastical in the real world of Washington.” – ?@davidaxelrod? https://t.co/HRwuBJEdF5
— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) August 3, 2019
Some of the local officials who are backing Warren over Sanders this time point to his gruff personality.
“If you’re a leader, being liked is not a bad thing,” – Wayne Burton a NH local elected who backed Sanders four years ago and now wants Warren.https://t.co/duECP1nGXE
— Annie Linskey (@AnnieLinskey) August 3, 2019
Baud
Does anyone remember this? From what I recall, they were very similar on policy.
Baud
I remind myself it’s still early, but I wish she would put him away already.
debbie
@Baud:
I recall the Clintons were a bit dismissive of the hope-y, change-y thing.
A Ghost To Most
Warren could be the most brilliant teacher on the planet, but she wouldn’t gain an inch with my brother. Wilful ignorance is a helluva drug.
Baud
@debbie:
I remember that. But that has nothing to do with plans. I don’t think.
Another Scott
She’s very, very good. We need more public servants like her, especially in the Senate.
In other news, Krebs – Who owns your wireless service?
Cellular services (and broadband in general) are yet another area that need much more regulation. I hope her ‘public option for broadband’ plan addresses much more than simply getting people hooked up.
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@A Ghost To Most:
So is bigotry of any kind.
Omnes Omnibus
OT: WTF Coors is using Toots and the Maytals’ Pressure Drop in a TV ad. All I can say is at least they went with Toots and I hope that the people involved are paying residuals to the people who deserve them. I mean, fucking Coors.
Doug R
@Another Scott: I keep getting phone calls from a 1-888 number that on the books is Telus customer service (local big Bell).
Phone rings, my answering machine answers and call hangs up. Nothing said. Happens generally once or twice a day.
I really wish the phone companies would wrestle control of their products away from the scammers, I’m starting to understand how the phone phreaks that started Apple and Microsoft were able to get away with so much long distance calling shenanigans.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Omnes Omnibus: Toots! What a voice.
Gin & Tonic
@Doug R: Woz was a phreak, but Gates never was.
Omnes Omnibus
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: For some reason I am now listening to the soundtrack from The Harder They Come.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m partial to “In The Dark”.
Heard Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders playing the song “The Harder They Come” earlier today.
TomatoQueen
I’m so old I remember all the complaining about The Phone Company, all the time, everywhere, as a constant background hum, while we all got on with our work, quietly admitting that the service was good, in fact very good indeed, if only they weren’t such control freaks. And now we have garbage service, no white pages, robocalls, and no reason to answer the damn phone. Unless you have a land line, which I do, and will never give up, as it still somehow functions as it nearly always did.//Old Luddite
Emma
Folks, since this seems to be an open thread, I need some advice. Our elderly dog sleeps with my dad. Lately he has taken to licking anything he can reach, so much so that he soaks the bedding (it’s not urine; I’ve actually watched him do it). My dad is freaking out, thinking it’s a mortal disease; the vet says it’s just a habit of old dogs. I just had to stop my 84 year old father from driving 15 miles to the all-night clinic.
Anybody has any ideas?
Burnspbesq
I had a couple of rockstar profs in law school—most notably Mike Graetz, who is right up there with Marty Ginsburg on the list of the pre-eminent tax scholars of our time. Warren is in that class. Some seriously ground-breaking scholarship.
laura
@Emma: Chet does it. It seems like an anxiety/self comforting thing. I kept an extra throw -like a beach sarong on top of the bed and easy to launder. Also, cbd – salve or [email protected]Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: back in the days of my yoot, I got to see Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders in a small club in Berkeley. A deeply satisfying pairing and all around good show.
FlyingToaster
@TomatoQueen: Actually, I get more spam calls on the landline than the mobile. Some of them are mildly hilarious (the “Microsoft support” calls to an all Mac/Chrome household are particularly funny, though tonight “Apple Support” robocalled, which is even funnier to a Mac programmer). Some are just weird: there’s a recurrent robocall about healthcare to a landline in the heart of Massachusetts, where we got Romneycare in 2006. Anyone who doesn’t have insurance here doesn’t fucking want it. And the Chinese robocalls are just pretty much WTF???
I can screen calls on the mobile, so I have no effing idea who’s calling from Outer Buttfuck, FlyOverCountry. But it’s guaranteed to be a scam.
Location pegging will do nobody any good, since it’s all within 25 miles. Waze does that and tries to sell me Dunks on MemDrive. Which would require a left turn and is NEVER GOING TO WORK on MemDrive Inbound at 8:30am. Jeebus.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@TomatoQueen: “We’re the phone company: We don’t care. We don’t have to.”
grammypat
As a non-traditional adult student in college (BS @40yo), I formed the opinion early that a teacher/instructor/professor needed 3 things:
To Care
To Know Their Shit
To Be Able to Effectively Communicate said Shit.
Good ones could get by with 2, the great ones possessed 3 and were rare. Elizabeth Warren has all three.
jl
Go Warren. Seems not solidly in top three with Biden and Sanders. Woo-hoo!
I wanted her to run in 2016, and if she had, I think good chance she would not be SPW, but rather PPW now.
Gelfling 545
@FlyingToaster: I find the whole idea that a human from Apple or Microsoft support would actually contact a user hilarious. Just try finding a person to speak to!
Chacal Charles Calthrop
OT for anyone here who admired David Rees’ “Get Your War On” he has read Michael Ignatieff’s “Getting Iraq Wrong” in the NYT magazine and his opinion of it is, well, priceless (if the link doesn’t work just google Cormac Ignatieff):
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cormac-ignatieffs-the-roa_b_59363
jl
@grammypat: Teacher Warren probably knows how to wash out a foul mouthed kid’s mouth out with soap real good. Not sayin’… just sayin’…
My Side of Town
The Trump campaign is desperately trying to connect the Dayton shooter to Democrats. Only… no Democrats are saying Saturday night revelers are infesting, invading or trying to replace white people. But Trump and Fox ARE saying that about Mexicans and Central American immigrants and POC whose families have lived here far longer than most whites. As everyone knows. But the lying liars will be liars, as everyone knows.
ED: I know this has nothing to do with the topic at at hand, but I wanted to vent.
FlyingToaster
@Gelfling 545: Precisely! I can find a person to speak do if I go online to Apple.com and make an appointment to visit a local Apple Store in a week or two. Otherwise, nope.
A lot of the tech scam calls are funny because they assume that you’re an 80-year-old Comcast customer. If you’re not, and you have your own router, own WAP, own network rules, parental control over the kid’s iDevices, you can string that call along for 10, 15 minutes before they start cursing and hang up on you.
Jay
@Doug R:
You can digitally spoof call numbers to mobile devices using VOIP.
It’s a common scammer tactic to fake being your bank, your service provider, utilities, cops, etc.
BellyCat
@grammypat: Former prof here — Damn good insight on your part!
When I joined the ranks, I was shocked to learn how few had *any* of those attributes, let alone all three.
Warren (who came from basically nothing) is amazing and might very well pull it off. Here’s hoping!
Jay
TomatoQueen
@FlyingToaster: Hehehe you have Massphone, a variation. I grew up with the Southern New England Telephone Company, a place of erm dignity and probity and the first phone co switchboard. Such things are gone now. But with Nomorobo, I get my calls screened, with CallerID displayed on the tv box I can usually identify the remaining troublemakers and by and large the garbage is taken care of–I don’t feel compelled to answer the damn thing. Also, I don’t give my phone numbers out unless necessary and have always been nonpublished. But it all costs a fucking fortune.
TomatoQueen
OT/open thread, but I am suddenly catless, as Luca was put to sleep today. He was not the ideal companion at all, but still leaves a big empty place, so in a little while I can offer a home to a somebody in need.
Emma
@TomatoQueen: I am so, so sorry. Every pet we’ve had to put down — one dog, one cat, one pot-bellied pig, we’re equal opportunity pet people — has left a big hole in my heart. I try not to think about our 12 year old schnoodle as anything but a healthy elderly gentleman, but the specter is there. I hope I have the bravery to start again.
Hungry Joe
Warren is my first, second, third, fourth, and fifth choices. I’m undecided about sixth, but she’s also my seventh, eighth, and ninth. For all kinds of reasons, not the least of which being I think she’d make a GREAT president. And that’s kind of a good reason to back someone.
Jay
Now two comments in moderation,….
Why oh why do you guys not like me?
grammypat
@jl: Probably not a good idea to *try* to wash out a construction worker’s mouth with soap. Too many muscles and too much attitude.
@BellyCat: Thx. It didn’t take very long to form that opinion. I wasn’t there because it was expected of me … I was there to get a long-delayed education and had NO tolerance for incompetence.
laura
@TomatoQueen: so very sorry for your loss, even the non-conforming companions find a home in your heart.
Mary G
This is horrific:
This is abominable. Millions of children will have to be afraid that their parents could disappear, and Adam is right, the administration did this on purpose. Scum.
Litlebritdifrnt
When my office was the location of the Obama campaign in 2008 the local organizer was one of his former students from Chicago. Jason (the organizer) spoke in such glowing terms of his former law school prof, that I worried he was going to kill himself with overwork. He would happily sleep on a couch in the office rather than go to his motel room so that he could get up and get started earlier the next day. He spoke in such glowing terms about Obama and on more than one occasion said to me “I would throw myself in front of a bullet for that man”. The day after the election when he came to the office to collect his things I threw my arms around him and said “We turned North Carolina Blue” and he smiled and said he would gladly do it all again. I get the feeling that Elizabeth’s students are like that, they adore her and would gladly work their asses off to get her elected. That is some powerful stuff.
Mary G
@Mary G: More pictures of Mississippi children stranded by ICE:
Jay
@TomatoQueen:
Sometimes it’s the ornery ones that steal our hearts the most.
Amir Khalid
@TomatoQueen:
Luca sounds like he was very much his own person. I am truly sorry for your loss.
The Dangerman
@My Side of Town:
Good luck to them.
Personally, I’m waiting for the shooting (not that I want one, obviously) where the Right immediately screams “the video games” and the parents come out and say that he (it’s always a he) never played video games (there are a few of us; last video game I played was … not counting Vegas here … hmmm, it was circa Asteroids).
smike
@grammypat:
The “Care” part is sadly lacking in many situations. I’ve had some instructors who knew their shit, no problem, but had no interest in whether you learned or not. Serious flaw, and wasted money.
Mandalay
Woody Harrelson had dinner with Trump many years ago.…
Mary G
Why there is no slick ad of Twitler visiting people in the hospital in Texas:
TomatoQueen
Thank you, everyone. Time to try to sleep.
Jay
@The Dangerman:
Jay
Jay
Jay
Three stuck in moderation,
Jay
lahke
Oh, darn, the power came back on. Now I don’t need to eat up all the ice cream.
Amir Khalid
@lahke:
Darn it. Sometimes it feels like the
fatesutilities are conspiring against you, doesn’t it?grammypat
@smike: Yeah, apathy is just as much a problem as incompetence. Together, they’re toxic (see: Current administration).
Jay
@lahke:
You don’t need to,
But you still can.
Jay
Record for moderation now,….
mrmoshpotato
@Jay:
Stop saying p—s! :)
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
It looks like the thread below is dead. The race riots of the early 20th century were discussed and how the AfAm community organized in self-defense as a result. As we all know, American society was overwhelmingly racist (not just systemically, but overtly as well). Today, racism, overt racism, is no longer as once accepted as it once was among most Americans. American society is far more diverse than a century ago. I’m wondering if enough tolerant whites, particuarly of my generation (Millennial), will be enough to make a difference in turning the tide, even if it unfortunately has to come to violence to deter white supremacists.
It burns me up reading those accounts of fear and hate from the previous thread. Do any of you ever wish when you read those stories that you could’ve been there and done something? I do.
kindness
I can easily say I will vote for which ever Democrat is nominated. I can say that easily because the only awful ones will be gone in a month. Even if it’s Bernie (it won’t be Bernie either).
lahke
Thunder is still rumbling and grumbling overhead. The power may go off again, you never know. At that point I will selflessly fling myself onto the Haagen Dazs.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@lahke:
I’ve never had Haagen Daz. Is it good ice cream?
Cacti
Elizabeth Warren is just like Obama.
Without the charisma.
Amir Khalid
@lahke:
‘Tis a far far nobler thing you do than you have ever done before …
lahke
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
A quart of coffee, my very favorite. Though I have purchased several of the little cups if there wasn’t an alternative, in order to get my fix. For some reason it’s harder to find the coffee ice cream during the summer; I think that they are making more fruity stuff then.
What’s really nutty is that I don’t drink coffee. Terrible stuff.
Mnemosyne
@TomatoQueen:
I just saw this and wanted to say I’m sorry for your loss. Sometimes it’s the ones you have a complicated relationship with that are the hardest to lose. ?
The Dangerman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Is there bad ice cream?
Haagen Daz is great.
lahke
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Very high fat content, very smooth on the tongue, no guar gum to turn it chewy– I love it. My cholesterol levels prove it.
mrmoshpotato
@The Dangerman:
Frozen whipping cream? :)
Amir Khalid
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Well, Häagen Dazs* think so. It’s something of a luxury brand, thicker and richer than your typical supermarket-brand ice cream. It’s priced that way too.
*Note the idiosyncratic spelling of the name: that ä doesn’t actually do anything, it’s just there for show.
mrmoshpotato
@lahke: I hope your freezer isn’t full of frozen pizza too!
Chetan Murthy
@Amir Khalid: True story: First time I had Haagen-Dazs was (in 1992) while visiting a colleague working at DIKU (a university) in Copenhagen. He told me that the company got its start in Denmark (of course I knew it was available in the US). Heh, only after I bought it completely, did he fess up that it was actually started in New Jersey.
lahke
@mrmoshpotato: Fruit, actually. Berries and peaches, waiting for the mango prices to drop (I hope). I don’t have the canning skills or patience of our blogfather, so I just wash, pit, and freeze. So far the power was only off for half an hour, so no harm done.
Chetan Murthy
@lahke:
Heh, same here: mangoes from last year. Made a mango-banana smoothie this evening. Yum!
mrmoshpotato
@lahke: Look out!
Amir Khalid
@Chetan Murthy:
Per Wikipedia, Häagen Dazs was actually founded not far away, in Brooklyn Heights, New York. The invented name was supposed to look Danish, but the Danish language doesn’t use umlauts or the zs letter combination.
Martin
This isn’t settling things down here.
Notable that they now need to document of the ethnicity of the victims and suspect.
Mary G
@Martin: Imagine what he could’ve done with an assault rifle.
Martin
@Mary G: Yeah. I wonder what the story behind this attack is.
dr. luba
LBJ was a teacher. And quite good at politicking.
dr. luba
@Martin: “Driving a silver Mercedes.” Must be that economic anxiety we keep hearing about.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@TomatoQueen: Slowpoking a bit here, but I’m sorry for your loss :(
As to the OP, Warren is really good at this, and seems to keep getting better at it. She and Harris are way ahead of everyone else in my candidate ranking.
Ceterum censeo factionem Republicanam esse delendam.
Mike in NC
A sunny day in Invergordon, Scotland. MSNBC has a story up about scumbag Wayne LaPierre trying to buy a huge lakeside mansion in Texas with his blood money. May he DIAF.
low-tech cyclist
@TomatoQueen:
I know what you mean. Wilbur, our 19 year old tuxedo cat, and the last survivor of a group of cats we took in back around the turn of the millennium, finally got to the point just a few weeks ago where his time had clearly come.
It’s the first time since 1982 that I’ve been without felines (usually two or three of them!) and the house feels very strange without any cats. We’re going on vacation later this month, but once we get back, we too will be keeping our eyes and ears open for cats that need a home.
low-tech cyclist
@Baud:
Me too, but we want her to do so in a way that wins over his followers, and doesn’t have them resenting her. She’s not going to accomplish that by doing a Delaney-style execution.
satby
@TomatoQueen: Condolences on the passing of Luca.
@low-tech cyclist: and condolences also on the passing of Wilbur.
A long, safe life loved by people is heaven on earth to them, and you both gave them that. Let that bring you some comfort.
Noir
@TomatoQueen: I’m so sorry to hear of your loss. Their absence leaves kind of a palpable emptiness in the house, and in our lives. My condolences.
Miss Bianca
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: Dead thread, I am sure, but I am soooo swiping this line:
Whole essay is brilliant, of course. Thanks for sharing!
Ben Cisco
@Martin: Only the suspect’s ID mattered. They did that back in NC all the time, and used one such crime to craft a law forcing local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE.
TomatoQueen
@low-tech cyclist: So sorry for your loss. 19 is a wonderful age for a kitty, tho; I don’t seem to be able to keep any past about 14 and poor Luca’s age and much else about him were never more than approximations, as he was a rescue. I hope the empty feeling is tolerable and soon replaced by a new friend or friends. Thanks also to all BJers, this is such a kind group of people and I’m fortunate to have made your acquaintance.
JDM
They just never watched or listened to Warren before; that’s why they’re surprised. Here’s what it’s like: I was in Toronto for a while the first year they won the World Series. The All Star Game was also held there that summer. We were watching that. A long fly deep into center sent Devon White into one of his patented sprints, obviously an easy catch, well, obvious to people who’d been watching Devon before. But after the utterly predictable run down and catch, the announcers were amazed, astounded, that he got to the ball. Any Blue Jays fan watching that knew Devon was going to get to that ball easily.
That’s what it’s like watching people – people whose job it is to know this stuff already – be surprised by something that’s utterly commonplace to those who’ve been paying attention.
Sasha
Lifelong teacher vs. proud know-nothing. Should be fun.
LanceThruster
Bernie-lite… but I hope she gets a position in his cabinet.