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Why I Was Wrong About Elizabeth Warren

And her growing popularity suggests others are coming around, too.

As the Democratic presidential campaign began, I was deeply skeptical of Elizabeth Warren.

My first objection was that she appeared to have parlayed possible Native American heritage to gain academic jobs (Harvard Law School listed her as Native American beginning in 1995). That offended me, and I knew it would repel huge numbers of voters.

Second, I thought she shot from the hip and, with her slight political experience, would wilt on the campaign trail.

Third, I thought she was a one-note Sally, eloquent on finance but thin on the rest of domestic and foreign policy.

So much for my judgment: I now believe I was wrong on each count, and her rise in the polls suggests that others are also seeing more in her. Warren has become the gold standard for a policy-driven candidate, and whether or not she wins the Democratic nomination, she’s performing a public service by helping frame the debate.

Let’s examine my misperceptions. First, The Boston Globe conducted a rigorous examination of Warren’s legal career, and it is now clear that she never benefited professionally from Native American associations.

“The Globe found clear evidence, in documents and interviews, that her claim to Native American ethnicity was never considered by the Harvard Law faculty, which voted resoundingly to hire her, or by those who hired her to four prior positions at other law schools,” the newspaper concluded.

Then there’s the concern about political naïveté and inexperience. Warren first ran for office only in 2012; even Pete Buttigieg has been in elective politics longer.

It’s reasonable to worry about her electability, partly because last year she won re-election in Massachusetts as senator with a smaller share of the popular vote than Hillary Clinton had received two years earlier in the state. In contrast, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota hugely outperformed Clinton.

I worried about a tendency to shoot from the hip when Warren misread an article and in 2016 wrote a Facebook rant denouncing a supposedly greedy Trump-supporting investor, Whitney Tilson. In fact: Tilson opposed Trump and agrees with Warren on most issues; indeed, Tilson had previously donated to Warren.

The unbalanced screed resembled a Trump tweet and made me wonder about Warren’s judgment. But Warren later apologized, and she has been more careful since. Tilson told me that he thinks the rant was not part of a pattern but perhaps reflected a sleep-deprived moment.

More broadly, Warren has improved tremendously as a politician. Early on, she sometimes came across as a stern Harvard professor eager to grill you about an obscure tort case. She’s now much better on the hustings. Forget the tort case and Harvard Law; she’s an Oklahoma gal who wants to have a beer with you.

Finally, I was manifestly wrong on Warren’s policies. She has been a geyser of smart proposals, including one I particularly like for universal child care. This would resemble the outstanding child care program operated by the U.S. military and would benefit both working moms and at-risk kids.

Warren also has a range of other proposals, pertaining to everything from election reform to housing, antitrust to corporate governance. Then she offers a wealth tax to help pay for social programs.

One of America’s biggest problems is the collapse of the working class and the lower middle class, with suicide at a 30-year high and drug and alcohol abuse causing life expectancy to fall. Warren confronts that crisis head-on both with her personal story and with sharp policies to boost opportunity. Her 2017 memoir, “This Fight Is Our Fight,” is that rarity of campaign books: a decent read.

Warren’s proposals might or might not succeed, but they are serious, based on work by top scholars. She is a believer in a market economy, regulated to keep it from being rigged, and in corporations that contribute to the well-being of all. And while she’s no expert on foreign policy, her instincts on avoiding war with Iran and showing concern for Palestinians seem good ones.

At her best, Warren is also brilliant at shaping the narrative. In 2011, she explained why taxing the rich isn’t “class warfare.”

“There’s nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody,” she said in a clip that went viral. “You built a factory out there? Good for you! But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces the rest of us paid for.”

She ended: “You built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay it forward for the next kid who comes along.”

That’s a conversation we need to have in America, and I’m glad Warren is getting attention so that she can make her case.

How Elizabeth Warren Learned to Fight

She was Betsy to her mother, who expected her to marry. Liz to fellow high school debaters, whom she regularly beat. Now, the lessons of an Oklahoma childhood are center stage in the presidential race.

OKLAHOMA CITY — It was 1962 in Oklahoma City and Liz Herring, a new student at Northwest Classen High School, was feeling insecure. She was good at school, had skipped a grade, and now, as a skinny freshman with glasses and crooked teeth who had grown up in a town south of the capital, she was hungry to fit in.

She joined the Cygnet Pep Club to show her school spirit and the Courtesy Club to help visitors find their way around the school. She became a member of the Announcers Club, reading messages over the school’s central sound system. But it was the debate club where she really found herself. At a time when Home Ec and preparing for marriage were priorities for young women, debate was a place where they could compete on equal ground.

She loved learning about the big topics of the day — Medicare, unions, nuclear disarmament. She began carrying around a large metal box with hundreds of index cards with quotes and facts written on them.

She was competitive and had extraordinary focus and self-discipline, spending hours after school each day practicing. Joe Pryor, a high school friend and debate teammate, remembers her “ruthlessness in preparation.” By the time they were juniors, he said, “she was just flat out better than me.”

Mr. Pryor still recalls that even among good high school debaters, there was something different about his teammate Liz. “She wanted to be the best,” he said last month. “She wanted it more than I did. She wanted it more than anybody did.”

It has been over 50 years since that time and Liz Herring has become Elizabeth Warren, one of the 24 women and men vying for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency.

Her ferocious command of details on a debate stage once earned her a college scholarship. Now she is deploying that skill in town halls across the country and on Wednesday in the Democratic National Committee’s first debate for the 2020 election.

While her prowess in debate has remained a constant, her political views have not.

Since rising to national prominence after the 2008 financial crisis, Ms. Warren has been seen as a pugilist on the left, a fighter against an economic system that she sees as fundamentally unfair. But in her early life and as a young adult, Ms. Warren was not bucking the system or the conservative community she inhabited. She was striving within it, using it to launch herself out into the world.

“She needed it,” said Judy Garrett, her sophomore year English teacher. “She needed it to get where she is.”

That was not easy in 1960s Oklahoma. There seemed to be only one option for an ambitious woman: becoming a teacher. Ms. Warren set her sights on that. Her mother, the driving force in the family, spent her time making sure that her only daughter knew any professional aspiration should come second to marriage.

Ms. Warren’s path to success was not direct, but a circuitous journey of starts and stops. She fought to go to college out of state, but dropped out at 19 when her high school boyfriend reappeared with a proposal for marriage. That moment reflects the central struggle of her early life, a tension between her ambitions in the world versus her understanding of a woman’s role in the home.

Even now, her old friends and acquaintances express some surprise at her presidential run. Her high school debate partner, Karl Johnson, a star student, used to have aspirations for higher office, they said. And while Ms. Warren was his equal in talent and drive, they had not imagined that she, a woman, would be the one to try.

“It’s a real commentary on our generation,” said Gary Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s younger brother. “No one ever thought it would be Liz.”

The Herrings of Wetumka

Ms. Warren’s family has been in Oklahoma as long as it has been a state. Her parents grew up in the tiny town of Wetumka, where the western prairie meets the eastern hills, and eloped in 1932.

The Herrings, her father’s family, opposed the match because her mother’s family, the Reeds, were part Native American, according to Ms. Warren’s account in her 2014 book, “A Fighting Chance.” In an interview in The New Yorker, Ms. Warren said she learned of the elopement after pestering her mother about her wedding dress, only to be told that she never had one.

Her father’s family owned a hardware store, and he went from working there to a failed car sales venture in the town of Seminole to selling carpet for Montgomery Ward in Norman, a town about 20 miles south of the capital.

He and his wife, Pauline, had three boys, Don Reed, John and David, and eight years later, a little girl, Elizabeth, who was born in June 1949. She was a surprise that her mother was fond of saying made her a member of the PTA “longer than any woman on God’s green earth,” Ms. Warren wrote in “A Fighting Chance.”

As a child, Betsy, as her family called her, liked to have things go her way, a childhood playmate from her street in Norman remembered.

“Have you ever been around someone who has to be in charge, who has to be the one that everybody looks up to?” said Danice Bowers, who now works in a school library in Shawnee, Okla. “That was Betsy Herring.”

She was also smarter than the rest of the children, Ms. Bowers said, and when she reached sixth grade, she skipped it. Her mother pressed for the family to move from Norman to Oklahoma City so their daughter could attend what she saw as the best school around. That was Northwest Classen, a modern building of glass and brick that had a reputation for academic excellence. It had a German club, a Spanish club and a Great Books club, even its own amateur radio station. The Herring family settled just a few blocks away.

Ms. Warren didn’t grow up with the politics she has today, but came to them later through her research on why people declare bankruptcy. But a seed was planted early in the form of financial distress that shook her own family.

When she was 12, her father had a heart attack. Ms. Warren describes what happened next in “A Fighting Chance.” He came home from the hospital changed. He ate poached eggs with the yolks taken out and got yelled at if he tried to lift grocery bags. His job as a salesman for Montgomery Ward was downgraded to commission-only. Pauline, who was 50 then, had to go to work for the first time in her married life. The episode is now a staple of her daughter’s stump speech.

Her parents drank, her mother yelled and her father seethed. One day, her mother, crying in an upstairs bedroom, jammed her body into a formal black dress that no longer fit, and walked to a job interview at Sears.

“I stood looking at her while she tugged on the zipper,” Ms. Warren wrote. “She rubbed her eyes with another Kleenex and blew her nose. She stood still for a while. Finally, she lifted her head and looked straight at me. ‘How do I look? Is it too tight?’”

Writing about it as an adult, Ms. Warren would show that the experience had left her with a deep understanding of working-class pain: At its root is a feeling of worthlessness and an instinct to hide from the world.

Her father, she recalled, told her that the shame of failure had nearly killed him. “He wanted to die,” she wrote. “He wanted to disappear from our lives and from the earth and from everything that had gone wrong.”

‘All a Bunch of Cheaters’

The experience at age 12 left Ms. Warren with the belief that honest people help themselves — that when trouble arrives, they tug on the dress, blow their nose, and walk to Sears. That assumption guided her research on personal bankruptcy in her early years as a law professor.

“I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters,” she said in a 2007 interview, describing to a Berkeley historian her views of families who declared bankruptcy. “I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us by hauling off to bankruptcy and just charging debts that they really could repay.”

That is the sort of sentiment that Ms. Warren’s high school friends might have expected to hear from her. As a teenager and young adult, Ms. Warren was conservative, said Dr. Katrina Cochran, a close high school friend who would go on to become a psychologist.

The two women sat next to each other for years in desks arranged alphabetically by surname, and Dr. Cochran, who was Katrina Harry in high school, remembered talking about politics at lunchtime. She adored her friend, but their political views differed. Ms. Warren believed government’s role in American life should be limited.

“She was extremely conservative at the time,” said Dr. Cochran, whose father was working in Democratic politics. She said Ms. Warren would joke about her friend’s Democratic leanings. “She would ask me what other subversive organizations I was a member of besides the Democratic Party.”

Oklahoma, which became a state in 1907, had been a crazy quilt of political impulses, from the prairie populism of the 1890s to the election of socialists in the 1910s.

By the early 1960s, when Ms. Warren started high school, the Republican Party was beginning to take the state back from decades of Democratic control. The dominant culture, regardless of political party, was conservative — a pride in country and an emphasis on family that Ms. Warren was steeped in.

“The Summer of Love hadn’t reached us,” Mr. Pryor, a high school debate teammate, said of Oklahoma in the 1960s. “When you saluted the flag, it was emotional. You believed we were right to fight the Communists in Vietnam. It was not right to doubt the government. This was the era we grew up in. We were true believers at that point.”

That was precisely how Dr. Cochran — who has recently been back in touch with Ms. Warren and even spoke in a campaign ad — described her friend, wondering aloud in the interview “how someone who was so rich in the idea of nationalism and conservatism and capitalism could have such a significant turnaround politically.”

Karl Johnson, Ms. Warren’s debating partner, said in an interview in May that he had started to “become radicalized around the Vietnam War and protest music,” in their junior year. He remembered being “pilloried for weeks on end as a traitor and a communist,” in the local media after telling reporters he opposed the war, and being called into the principal’s office because he refused to cut his hair.

“Liz was not a member of that group that talked politics a lot and was antiwar,” Mr. Johnson said. “She wasn’t put off by my political views. She just didn’t share them.”

By Ms. Warren’s own account, her parents were not the types to talk politics around the dinner table. As for the war, it was personal for them in another way: Don Reed, Ms. Warren’s oldest brother, was flying combat missions in Vietnam.

When asked whether Ms. Warren identified as a Republican in those years, her campaign said she would not give an interview. An attempt to find out from her brother, David Herring, who still lives in Norman, was unsuccessful — he politely declined to talk after answering his door.

Not an ‘Old-Maid Schoolteacher’

The conflict between her ambition and her family’s expectations came to a head in her senior year of high school. Her friends were all applying to college and she wanted to go, too. But her mother was against it.

“She had been yelling at me,” she wrote in her 2017 book, “This Fight Is Our Fight,” recalling an argument she had with her mother. “Why was I so special that I had to go to college? Did I think I was better than everyone else in the family? Where would the money come from?”

Mrs. Herring had been the one to lobby for the family to move to Oklahoma City for her daughter’s education. But she was also trying to protect her daughter in a world she knew was harsh to women who did not conform. In that social order, marriage was more important than college.

“Mother was suspicious of women who had families and worked,” Ms. Warren wrote. “Working was for women who weren’t lucky enough to have a husband and children.”

Ms. Warren had been preparing for both.

By her senior year, her classmates recalled, she was a debate team star. Her exceptional ability to focus, rare among the teenage boys she was going up against, had made Northwest Classen one of the best teams in the state. Ms. Warren and her partner, Mr. Johnson, would go on to win the state championship their senior year. She was particularly good at rebuttal — taking apart the other side’s argument in four minutes.

“I’ve seen her work miracles in that slot,” said Mr. Johnson.

But she took her home economics studies seriously, too. As a senior, she won the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award, memorizing the butterfat content of heavy cream and how to tie off a lazy daisy stitch, according to “A Fighting Chance.”

When she would tell someone she wanted to be a teacher, her mother, who called her Betsy long after she became Liz, would interrupt.

“My mother would break into the conversation and explain to whomever I was talking to, ‘But she doesn’t want to be an old-maid schoolteacher,’” Ms. Warren wrote. “Then she would turn to me, pause, and narrow her eyes. ‘Right, Betsy?’”

Ms. Warren eventually won the argument. Her debating skills earned her a full scholarship to George Washington University in Washington, D.C.,“sort of the equivalent of an athletic scholarship, only this was one that actually a girl could get,” she said in the 2007 Berkeley interview. She paid for the application fees with money she made from babysitting and waitressing.

But two years later, when her old high school boyfriend, Jim Warren, popped back into her life with a marriage proposal, it was her mother’s values that moved her. She dropped out, and at 19, got married in the same Oklahoma City church her family had attended for years.

“For nineteen years I had absorbed the lesson that the best and most important thing any girl could do was ‘marry well,’” she wrote. “Somewhere deep in my heart, I believed that no man would ever ask me to marry him. When Jim popped the question, I was so shocked that it took me about a nanosecond to say yes.”

‘She Was Becoming Elizabeth’

That decision would set her life on a different track — at least for a while — and would perpetuate her central struggle: The young woman who bucked social expectations by fighting to go 1,300 miles away to college was also the woman who bent to them, putting her marriage and motherhood before her career.

Her decision to marry brought happiness and two children, but also, she has written, years of challenges as her career crept along, knocked off course every time her husband had to move for his — from Texas to New Jersey and back again.

They eventually divorced in 1980. Dr. Cochran said she divorced in that era, too, as did a number of other friends from Northwest Classen who were ambitious women at a time of shifting expectations. She said Elizabeth was loyal, and she believed she would have stayed married to Jim if he had been more flexible.

“She was becoming Elizabeth,” Dr. Cochran said of her friend, “and Jim didn’t know what to do.”

Eventually, her drive dominated and she became Elizabeth Warren, Harvard professor, Massachusetts senator, candidate for president.

Her voice is different now. She is no longer the young law professor researching bankruptcy cheats, or the freshman debater who called her Democratic friend subversive. She now sees government solutions to working-class problems. She is making that pitch to voters, hoping it will appeal to the men who might tell their daughters they feel like failures when work doesn’t go their way, or the women who find themselves in an ill-fitting dress on a job interview they didn’t expect to have to take.

Ms. Warren never moved back to Oklahoma after she left for college, but she carries a piece of it with her today — her time on the debate stage at Northwest Classen and everything she learned there.

[We asked Elizabeth Warren and 20 other Democratic presidential hopefuls the same set of 18 questions. Watch them answer.]

Judy Garrett, Ms. Warren’s sophomore English teacher, who remembers her as “the smartest student I ever had,” went on Ms. Warren’s website after she realized what her star pupil had gone on to do. Ms. Garrett sent her an email. To her surprise, she got a reply.

Ms. Warren thanked her for her note, and said it brought back memories of “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Julius Caesar” and the Beatles and of the December day that a boy had asked her to be his girlfriend in the custom of the day: by giving her a “drop,” a kind of charm necklace.

“Great teachers inspire students in so many ways,” she wrote. “I was skinny and young (I’d skipped a grade) and so sure everyone else had something I didn’t have and didn’t understand. I remember how you taught foreshadowing and how you said I didn’t have to go steady with a boy to be someone (a lesson I didn’t learn for about another 15 years). You were pretty and confident and calm. I so much wanted to be a teacher, and you were part of the reason.”

She concluded: “It really is good to hear from you. Please stay in touch. Liz.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

FOX NEWS FIRST: Warren’s DNA reveal backfires, angers Dems; Missing Saudi activist’s kin wants independent probe

Democrats are not thrilled that Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released DNA tests to prove her Native American ancestry and fear the controversy throws the party off-message before the midterm elections

THE LEAD STORY – DEMS ON WARPATH OVER WARREN’S DNA TEST: U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., might have believed that releasing DNA test results that apparently prove her Native American heritage would show up President Trump and other Republican critics and put the controversy to rest. However, it has only breathed new life into the story and angered fellow Democrats who fear a blue wave may not happen in next month’s midterm elections … President Obama’s former campaign manager, Jim Messina, on Monday sharply criticized Warren, saying she was throwing the Democratic Party off-message just weeks before November’s critical midterm elections. “Argue the substance all you want, but why 22 days before a crucial election where we MUST win house and senate to save America, why did @SenWarren have to do her announcement now?,” Messina tweeted. “”Why can’t Dems ever stay focused???”

Meanwhile, the Cherokee Nation dismissed Warren’s DNA test, saying, it “is useless to determine tribal citizenship.” Warren, considered a likely 2020 presidential contender, is an overwhelming favorite to win re-election in Massachusetts in November.

Trump promised $1 million to charity if Warren proved her Native American DNA. Now he’s waffling.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had said she would not “sit quietly” as President Trump made claims about her ancestry that she called racist. On Monday morning, she released a DNA testthat suggested she did have a distant Native American ancestor, and by the evening, she was using the ensuing dust-up to attack Trump.

“I’m going to get one of those little [DNA testing] kits and in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims she’s of Indian heritage … ‚” Trump said. “And we will say, ‘I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.’ “

“And let’s see what she does,” Trump continued. “I have a feeling she will say no, but we’ll hold that for the debates. Do me a favor. Keep it within this room?”

.. But by 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Warren took to Twitter to go after Trump, explain why she released a test that suggested she was correct about her heritage, and to reiterate that heritage played no role in her professional pursuits. She also acknowledged that tribal affiliation is determined only by tribal nations.

.. “Remember saying on 7/5 that you’d give $1M to a charity of my choice if my DNA showed Native American ancestry?” she tweeted. “I remember — and here’s the verdict. Please send the check to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.”

The charity she chose is an organization that seeks to protect Native American women from violence.

.. Warren said she took the test because she had “nothing to hide” — then dared Trump to release his tax returns.

.. Another reporter brought up his promise of a $1 million charity donation.
“I didn’t say that,” Trump said. “Nah, you’d better read it again.”

Soon after, the Hill posted a fact-checked headline: “Trump denies offering $1 million for Warren DNA test, even though he did.”

.. Earlier Monday, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, dismissed Warren’s DNA test as “junk science,” an early indication that Trump is unlikely to follow through on the donation promise he denies having made.
“I haven’t looked at the test. I know that everybody likes to pick their junk science or sound science depending on the conclusion, it seems some days,” Conway told reporters. “But I haven’t looked at the DNA test and it really doesn’t interest me … ”

.. On Monday afternoon, Trump was again asked by a reporter about the donation, and this time he said he would “only do it if I can test her personally.”

“That will not be something I enjoy doing either,” he added.

.. Trump has had a long history of making bold pledges to donate large sums of money to charity, without actually delivering on those promises, as The Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold uncovered in a series of articles that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.