Meghan Daum
Getting Serious About Elizabeth Warren’s Electability
She’s cornpone and wonky and taught Sunday school. But these underrated human qualities may well lift her into the White House.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw Elizabeth Warren. It was in Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit, and the Era of Predatory Lenders, a 2006 documentary by James Scurlock that essentially predicted the soon-to-come financial crisis. In addition to devastating interviews with debt-ruined consumers, the film featured a number of well-known faces, including then–Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, Eliot Spitzer, and Robin Leach (of all people). But the breakout star of the film was Warren, a Harvard Law professor known at the time mostly for a few books about the shrinking middle class. Cambridge chic in a black turtleneck, tweed jacket, and no-nonsense pageboy haircut, Warren held forth animatedly about predatory lending practices and how borrowers in bankruptcy were actually credit card companies’ favorite customers. With her now-familiar speech inflection — call it a cross between exasperation and golly-gee bafflement — Warren was a little bit dorky. She was also totally captivating—by far the most memorable part of the film.
