Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren put everyone on notice within the first few minutes of Wednesday night's debate that she wasn't kidding around anymore. She raised her hand, trained her sights on late entrant Michael Bloomberg, and neutralized him as a sexist billionaire who called women "fat broads and horse-faced lesbians" and would doom Democrats in November. "Understand this," she said, "Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another. This country has worked for the rich for a long time and left everyone else in the dirt. It is time to have a president who will be on the side of working families and be willing get out there and fight for them."
Warren came to the debate armed with fire, grit, heart, and intelligence, exercising them all judiciously throughout the night. After Warren rescued the other woman on the stage, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, from a pile on over her cringeworthy inability to name the president of Mexico in a pre-date interview, Warren turned around and leveled the health care plan on Klobuchar's website as a "Post-it note" sized couple of paragraphs. The biting line came amid a riff in which, one by one, Warren blasted the health care plans of nearly all her chief rivals as sadly perfunctory and insufficient, leaving each of them stumbling to respond yet unable to engage her in a one-on-one.
But what was perhaps most remarkable about Warren's performance was the conviction with which she took off the gloves off and settled into the pugilistic persona of a candidate who had sized up the stakes, concluded it was now or never, and thrown herself into the fight with abandon.
I have been waiting the entire campaign season to see one candidate or another rise to the political moment, stare history in the eye, and demonstrate the steely ferocity to rescue this nation from the brink. And while I have liked Warren all along, Wednesday night was the first time I saw the stone-cold killer that will be necessary to vanquish Donald Trump. As Heather Souvaine Horn wrote for The New Republic:
Here was an assassin, bathed in the blood of her enemies, turning steady eyes to the TV camera and offering her talents to the public: For the small price of a primary vote, this assassin will work for you.
Warren may have finally answered the electability question. It was never really about whether people would vote for a woman, but rather whether they believed she could get the job done. Even the original sin of being female might finally be forgivable if a candidate proved capable of castrating Trump. On Wednesday, Warren left for dead all the tired tropes about angry women on her way to announcing that, gender aside, she was the one.
Warren left that stage liberated as she took to the streets, eyes turned ahead. She took out a full-page ad in the newspaper of billionaire GOP donor Sheldon Adelson, promising the Casino mogul would be taxed $2.3 billion in the first year of her wealth tax. She unapologetically embraced the help of a pro-Warren super PAC, noting that "all of the men who were on the debate stage all had either super PACs." She went to a CNN town hall armed with a contract she had drawn up that would release all the women who had accused Bloomberg of sexual harassment from their non-disclosure agreements—she just happened to have taught contract law. "I'll text it," she quipped, in order to make it extra easy for Bloomberg. And Warren also began drawing some sharp contrasts between herself and Bernie. When asked by MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell to make the case for herself, Warren responded, "I get real stuff done. ... I don’t want to be president just to yell at people, I want to be president to change things. That's why I'm going there."
It remains to be seen how the nation responds Elizabeth Warren unplugged, but supporters old and new have certainly been voting with their dollars. The campaign announced Saturday that it had blown passed its goal of raising $7 million, $10 million, $12 million before the Nevada caucus, ultimately bringing in double the original goal, $14 million.
Warren proved herself to be a contender this week, she's squarely back in the ring, and she ain’t looking back.