Sceptics who think Elizabeth Warren cannot be nominated or elected as president of the United States tend to make three arguments. First, she is too left-wing. Second, she is too much of a preachy, “schoolmarm” college professor to appeal to regular Americans. And third, after the fiasco of Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016, it's too soon for Democrats to nominate another woman, much less one from liberal Massachusetts.
The best rejoinder to these contentions is to observe Warren in action.
In August she attended the Netroots Nation convention in New Orleans, the most important annual gathering of young grass-roots activists on the left. Warren talks with a slight Oklahoma twang, the antithesis of Brahmin Harvard. Her speech had the crowd on its feet, repeatedly interrupting with cheers and whoops. There were also moments when the audience was rapt, as when Warren recounted what happened after her father lost his job, and the political connections she eventually drew from this. Before her father's heart attack, she explained, her parents had managed to buy a three-bedroom house in a decent school district. Now all of that was in jeopardy.
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