Warren: the Modern Day Wonder Woman

By Jack Corby

Posted: January 13th, 2020. Updated: January 14th, 2020

In today’s political world, when you are at a rally and you see something orange walk onto the stage, you think a billionaire with fancy hair being trailed by men in black suits will follow. But, sitting inside Fisher Middle School’s gymnasium, the only thing that followed this orange blur was hope, prosperity, and black Nikes.

            I sit six rows deep, my back to the media team, cranking my neck to get a glimpse of Elizabeth Warren, the Senator from Massachusetts. My class and I had travelled a little over an hour to a small Iowa middle school to see the Senator, and her soon to be running mate Julian Castro, the former Housing and Urban Development Secretary under President Obama, speak. Castro is a former candidate and dropped out at the turn of the year, just to immediately back Warren and turn his efforts to supporting her, most likely in an effort to be sitting in the West Wing with her.

            As she entered the small pit that was created by the circling rows and rows of chairs, her smile brightened the room, bringing people to their feet and noises from their mouths and hands. She was dressed comfortably in black yoga pants, Nike shoes, and an orange sweater. But it was not the clothes that mattered, rather the person under them. Warren just simply captured the room and never let it go.

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            She flowed from story to story of her childhood, weaving in her current policies and what needed to be changed in Washington, America, and the world. She used one-line humor to keep the audience engaged (“It is never good when you have to number your husbands”) and to keep the conversation moving. And when she made a strong point that gandered applause, she threw her right arm into the air and gave the room a big smile. While everything she said did not captivate me personally, she proved to me, a liberal moderate who loves Amy Klobuchar (going to plug her at least once a post) that Warren is no joke. And she is in it to win it.

A lot of candidates run to get a name for themselves, make a little money, and fight for a cabinet position (see Castro). But Warren is not going down without a fight. The combination of her as President and Castro as VP is a deadly combo that will be very hard to beat as a pair, especially if Bernie Sanders cannot pull the African American vote from former VP Joe Biden. Add in her Harvard Law professor husband Bruce, pictured with me below, and Warren’s West Wing is shaping up to have a powerful, smart, and driven couple the world has not seen since the Clinton’s, maybe even the Kennedy’s.

            After she was done talking about her polices, policies that include ripping away big corporations’ money from Congress and introducing a wealth tax on the top 1%, she took questions. Yes, I know that every candidate takes questions. But for Warren, these questions were unvetted, completely on the spot, and 100% honest. Other candidates will have people write questions on a piece of paper and put it in a bin, with aids sorting through the questions and only passing along the best, er, right ones (yes, even Amy does this. Sad).

            Elizabeth took each question honesty, again weaving in her past as a teacher and a law professor and a mother and a daughter and a friend. She related to many different types of people and understood them. She looked people in the eyes and smiled with joy or cried with sadness for them. She was amazing in the moment and very, very Presidential. She exhibited traits and qualities you cannot see on a debate stage, which will end up being a problem for her nationally for casual voters. And her polices were very left wing, a little too left for this moderate. But today, in a small middle school in Marshalltown, Iowa, she was invincible and poised to find herself working, and living, in a new place in DC come January 2021.