A Fighting Chance (34 page)

Nobody Got Rich on His Own

A few days later, I declared war on the rich. Well, not really. But the right-wing blogs and Fox News sure made it sound as though I’d started stockpiling weapons and would soon be storming the mansions of Fifth Avenue.

After that gathering in New Bedford, I continued meeting with voters all around the state. These meetings were supposed to be quiet affairs, a chance to sit in someone’s living room and visit with people about what changes we needed in Washington. On Saturday, August 20, I was invited to speak at someone’s home in Andover.

Early that afternoon, we pulled up to a nice family home on a quiet street. The houses in the neighborhood had been built in the 1940s and ’50s, and now there were plenty of trees and a comfortable, settled feeling. But today there were cars parked everywhere. The hosts came out to meet me. They were as nice as could be, but a little flustered. They had thought they might get a couple of dozen people, but it seemed that more than a hundred had shown up. People were crammed into the living room, the dining room, the entry hall, and the back porch. The hosts explained that the word had gotten out and people just kept appearing. They hated to turn anyone away, so they sure hoped I could speak loudly.

It was warm—not as bad as New Bedford, but with all those people packed into the house, it was hot enough to turn my face red and make me wish for a jug of ice water.

I spoke for a bit, then took questions. Really, it wasn’t all that different from a lot of house parties during those weeks, except for one thing: someone had a video camera. Whoever it was recorded my little talk and later posted a clip on YouTube. The clip got a lot of attention, and the next thing I knew, Rush Limbaugh was calling me names and accusing me of being the worst sort of radical. So much for discreetly testing the waters.

At the time, I thought the argument I advanced that day in Andover was pretty uncontroversial. Someone had asked me how we were going to tackle the deficit, and in my response I got a little wound up. We hear about the deficit as if it’s a monster and America’s only choice is to slash and burn huge swaths of our budget immediately or face total destruction. All or nothing, live or die.

Yes, the deficit is a problem, and it deserves serious attention, but I don’t buy that there’s only one way out. I think we have to face a more fundamental issue first: How we spend our government’s money is about values, and it’s about choices. We could cut back on what we spend on seniors and kids and education, as the Republicans in Congress insisted we should. Or we could get rid of tax loopholes and ask the wealthy and big corporations to pay a little more and keep investing in our future. How we spend our money isn’t some absurdly complicated math problem. It’s about choices.

Here’s what I said in that video:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. 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 that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, 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 forward for the next kid who comes along.

Okay, I confess—the marauding bands was a little over the top. But I hoped the basic point came through: Without police, schools, roads, firefighters, and all the rest, where would those big corporations and “self-made” billionaires be? For capitalism to work, we all need one another.

When I first saw the video a few weeks after that Andover house party, I winced. My arms were all over the place, and it sounded like I was shouting. (Well, I
was
shouting, hoping the people standing out on the porch could hear me.) Not a very polished speech, but it would have to do.

I decided that if a surprise video of one of my appearances was going to get out, this wasn’t so bad. I hadn’t sat down to plot it out, but it was a pretty good statement about why I was running for the Senate. I wanted this race to be about the question at the heart of the video: How do we build a future? I made the case for what I believe: We are stronger and wealthier because of the things we build together. We are more secure when we create a foundation that allows each of us to have a decent chance to build something on our own. We are better off when we invest in one another. It’s economics and values, tied tightly together.

A lot of people got excited about the video and sent around the link. Pretty soon there were more than a million views on YouTube.
Moveon.org
posted the clip under the headline
THE ELIZABETH WARREN QUOTE EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO SEE
. The
Street
said I “was able to articulate—in a few words—what the Democratic Party has been unable to communicate for years.” (Wow—that was kind of depressing.) A
Business Insider
column called it “sheer political brilliance.” (Really? That made it sound as if the video were part of some grand strategy instead of totally unplanned.)

Before I could begin to imagine that I had some instinctive understanding of how to run for office, however, the conservatives swung into action. Fox News aired the clip and brought on a commentator who declared some of my words “not true” and “patently silly.” Rush Limbaugh jumped in and called me “a parasite who hates her host … [and is] willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.… This is the thinking behind Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.”

Whoa. Two minutes of off-the-cuff remarks about deficit reduction and how the wealthy should pay a little more in taxes, and suddenly I’m a parasite who hates her host? My campaign was off to quite a start.

The big banks kept a low profile at first, but before long they started weighing in against my campaign, too. One executive was quoted as saying: “It’s not even about Scott Brown.… It’s about: Do you want Elizabeth Warren in the Senate?” The answer came quickly: Wall Street bankers sent out “urgent appeals” to raise money for Scott Brown.

Wall Street’s response probably didn’t have anything to do with the video clip. The big banks had made up their minds about me long ago, and for good reason—they knew where I stood on financial reform. The election was a long way off, and already these guys were in all-out assault mode. I knew that a super-motivated Wall Street was much more dangerous than a blathering Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh could talk (and talk and talk), but the bankers had something a lot more powerful—endless buckets of money to throw into elections.

The campaign was just getting started, but already I felt like I was on the Tilt-A-Whirl ride at the carnival. Rush Limbaugh? Big-deal bankers who were squeezing their well-heeled friends to send money to Scott Brown? What was I in for?

Keep Your Clothes On

Before I could run against Scott Brown, I had to win the nomination of my own party. Five other Democrats had already thrown their hats in the ring. A debate was set up for October 4 at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell.

By that time, I had officially announced that I was a candidate for office. I had also found a terrific campaign manager, Mindy Myers, an experienced hand who had run two successful Senate campaigns. She was calm and steady and had great judgment, a perfect counterbalance to my damn-the-torpedoes-f-steam-ahead tendencies. Mindy brought organization and enormous savvy to the campaign. In addition, for her deputy she brought in Tracey Lewis, another experienced and coolly efficient pro who had done some great work on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

And then there was Dan. Dan Geldon still had the same iron will as that seven-year-old kid who gave up meat, and he never wavered in any battle. This would be our fourth fight together: first COP, then Dodd–Frank, then the consumer agency, and now a Senate campaign. Only now he wasn’t on his own anymore. Somehow, during this wild ride, Dan had found time to fall in love. He was engaged to be married, and he and his fiancée, Heather Geldhof, were settled in Washington. But the campaign would be in Massachusetts, so Dan—and Heather—agreed to pick up and come back to Boston.

The team came over to my house to help prepare for the debate. A couple of my former students played other candidates, and friends filled additional roles. But Dan boiled the session down to one lesson: Don’t screw up. Not exactly confidence-inspiring advice, but I knew why he was offering it. Pundits were saying that I was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. That was great news, except it also meant that I wasn’t going to get a few trial runs below the radar. People would be watching to see if a first-timer could pull this off, and there might be no second chances if I messed up.

I’d been a high school debater, but with six people onstage and questions about any topic at all—and only one minute allowed for each answer—I felt like I was trying to learn how to walk backward on the moon.

The debate was held in an auditorium that could seat about a thousand people, and it was a full house. When we arrived that night, a big, noisy crowd stood outside, waving signs and cheering for their candidates. I shook hands with nearly everyone—including people holding signs for the other candidates. If felt like a big party.

The stage was big and brightly lit—so bright that the only people I could see clearly were the other candidates. A seated panel of students began asking us questions, and they covered stuff I’d expected (“Do you support Planned Parenthood?” Yes!) and stuff I didn’t expect (“What superhero would you be?” Um … Wonder Woman! Who wouldn’t want a Lasso of Truth?). There were also questions that might have made news if anyone had given the wrong answer (“Have you driven drunk?” No.).

And then another question, this time from a young man in a dark jacket. The student began by pointing out that to help pay for his law school education, Scott Brown had posed for
Cosmo
. (In fact, he’d been chosen “America’s Sexiest Man” in June 1982, and a photo of him had run as the magazine’s nude centerfold.) Then the student asked us: “How did you pay for your education?”

When it was my turn to answer, I joked: “Well, I kept my clothes on.” I then hit what I thought was the real point:

I borrowed money.… I went to a public university at a time when they were well supported and tuition was cheap and I had a part-time job, so the combination got me through.

I was glad for the chance to talk about student loans. Costs were soaring out of control, and families were being asked to shoulder an ever-growing share of that burden. A lot of people were overwhelmed by their student debt loads, and I wanted Washington to step up and do more to help people who were trying to get an education. I wished I’d had more time to talk about this—a minute wasn’t nearly long enough.

Two days later, Senator Brown called in to a local radio show. The host asked him about my remark, and that’s when the conversation took a surprising turn:

HOST:
Have you officially responded to Elizabeth Warren’s comment about how she didn’t take her clothes off?

BROWN:
(laughing) Thank God.

HOST:
(laughing) That’s what I said! I said, “Look, can you blame a good-looking guy for wanting to, you know…?”

BROWN:
You know what, listen, bottom line is, you know, I didn’t go to Harvard.

Really? That was the bottom line? This seemed like stupid locker room stuff to me—but a lot of women were getting tired of stupid locker room stuff. As one of my friends said, “Enough! Women get hit like this all the time, and when we complain, the guys say, ‘Geez, can’t you take a joke?’ Well, no more.” The National Organization for Women called for Brown to apologize to the women of Massachusetts and step out of the race.

Some in the media declared Brown’s crack the “first major gaffe” of the campaign. As it turned out, it wouldn’t take me long to join him in the ranks of the big-time gaffe makers.

Gaffes, Gaffes, Gaffes …

On a sunny morning in early October, I headed to Quincy to start the day with breakfast at McKay’s, an old-school city diner with a counter and a dozen or so tables. The state senator, John Keenan, introduced me to many of the customers, and I had the chance to feed pancakes to a toddler while I talked with his grandparents.

Kyle Sullivan, who ran communications for the campaign, also came along. I felt lucky to have him as part of the team; he was cheerful and easygoing and he knew all the reporters in Massachusetts. He had set up a meeting at the diner with Samuel Jacobs from the
Daily Beast
. The three of us sat at a small, four-seat table and had a lively and engaging conversation that lasted twenty minutes, maybe longer.

During my time on COP and then at the consumer agency, I had talked with a lot of people in the press about the need to hold big banks accountable. A typical interview would last a while—sometimes a half hour or more—and the conversation would usually include plenty of back-and-forth about ideas and sometimes even an in-depth discussion about data. So I waded into the
Daily Beast
interview the same way I always had—expecting a lively exchange about whatever issues particularly interested the reporter.

That fall, Occupy Wall Street was going full throttle and Occupy Boston was making headlines, so Jacobs and I spent much of our time talking about Wall Street—the lack of accountability, the fury people were feeling, the need for change. I talked about the consumer agency and the kind of difference it was beginning to make. He really seemed engaged, and Kyle said he thought it was a good interview. Me too.