I’m still keeping an open mind, I want to see how candidates respond and perform. But I find this NYT piece tonight interesting and impressive.
It’s very much worth the read.
A few key excerpts, trying to respect fair use.
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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.”
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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.
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“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?”
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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.
We shall see how this all goes. I’m watching with interest.