A quick Elizabeth Warren story that's been on my mind this morning.
I sat down with Warren back in June. I was one more interview squeezed between back-to-back events in California, which was itself a trip squeezed between the time she was spending in the early states.
I sat down with Warren back in June. I was one more interview squeezed between back-to-back events in California, which was itself a trip squeezed between the time she was spending in the early states.
When I meet politicians under those scheduling circumstances, I always start by asking how they're holding up under the travel and schedule. It helps to give people who are still human beings a chance to admit they're tired, that this is hard on the body.
Warren looked me dead in the eye and said that she was absolutely great. She was loving it. She had learned, at her events, to tell the lighting staff to keep the lights on the audience high, so she could see the people she was talking to the whole time.
Once she had figured that out, and combined it with the selfie lines, and the refusal to hold big-dollar fundraisers, she had taken the experience of campaigning and made it human scale. And that made all the difference.
She was spending every day hearing from people who had real problems and really wanted to talk about solutions, and she was finding it energizing, not exhausting. And it seemed to be true. The hardest thing about interviewing Warren, by far, was getting her to slow down.
To steal a great line from a staffer on another campaign, a lot of politicians love "the people," but they don't really like people. Warren is a politician who really, really likes people. That's the engine of her politics.
I'm not saying she's the only politician that felt this way. But it's rarer than you might think, and it gave her a joy on the trail that didn't always come out in televised debates or Senate hearings, where she didn't have those human connections to ground her.
I don't remember if we got all of that initial conversation in my podcast with Warren, but we definitely kept the part on making sure she could really see who she was talking to, and the difference that made. It's right at the beginning, and worth a listen podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…
