The immediate reason for this diary is the fact that Elizabeth Warren is now in the lead in Real Clear Politics’s average of national Democratic primary polls. Her average is 26.6, ahead of Biden’s 26.4. Though the last digit of this is almost surely just statistical noise, her sharp recent rise in the polls is not; in The Economist’s more-principled polling average, though Warren has not yet passed Biden, the trend is even clearer:
But ultimately, polling is boring. So what this diary is really about is Warren leading. Here’s a list of ways:
Warren leads with her plans
She has fully 50 detailed plans up on her website. If you also count substantial Senate bills of which she’s the principal sponsor, it’s even more. They all tell a consistent story: fight for America’s middle class and poor, and against the overgrown power of the rich and corporations. Fight to protect and rebuild and strengthen what’s great about America and the world, using a thoughtful understanding of the tools available.
Honestly, even with the best possible results in the Senate, she’s not going to pass all of these plans. But even if she only passes 20% of them, it will still make her one of the most productive presidents in American history.
And it seems clear to me that Warren’s campaigning on detailed plans has set the bar for other campaigns, making this primary itself more of a productive debate on the issues. Which brings us to...
Warren leads with her tone
Elizabeth Warren has no qualms about attacking Donald Trump. She was one of the first candidates to clearly call for his impeachment, and she continues to call out both his personal corruption and his vicious use of power against the most vulnerable.
But in the Democratic primary, she’s consistently kept it clean, focusing on the issues, not on personal attacks. Again, I believe that this has helped improve not just her campaign, but the primary as a whole.
Warren leads with her brains
There’s no doubt that Elizabeth Warren is really really smart. You don’t go from the ragged edge of the Oklahoma middle class to teaching at Harvard without being a mental powerhouse. But the leadership here is more than just her smarts, it’s how she uses them.
She is a teacher. That means she looks for and cultivates the smarts in the people around her. And so over time, she has surrounded herself with people who are smarter than she is in their own domain, so that her plans reflect not just her best ideas, but the best ideas.
Warren leads with her heart
I’ve already talked about the empathy evident in her plans, and about the warmth and generosity of her tone. Those are the qualities most traditionally associated with “heart”. But now I want to focus on something else: her ability to pick herself up after a setback, understand what she did wrong, and move forward stronger than ever.
For example, the DNA test was a mistake.
It is one thing that she wrongly self-identified as Native American in the ‘80s; potentially hurtful as cultural appropriation, but also reflective of her desire to identify with the underdogs in her family story. But when Trump goaded her on this issue, falsely implying that she’d used it to get career advantages, she made a bigger mistake. The DNA test established the fact that she has some pre-Columbian ancestry, but badly blurred the distinction between that and Native American identity, in a way that reproduced patterns that are hurtful to First Nations peoples.
Many people thought that that one mistake had doomed her campaign. But she didn’t stop. She strengthened her outreach to Native leaders, and kept going. She learned from her mistakes. And that, to me, shows her heart.