The Story Elizabeth Warren Isn’t Telling
Katrina Cochran can still remember clearly how her close friend Liz Herring would needle her about her liberal politics when the two would sit next to each other at Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma, and during the years after.
“Besides the Democratic Party,” Herring, whose success on the debate team would win her a college scholarship, would say, “what other subversive organizations are you a member of?”
A half century later, Liz Herring is now Elizabeth Warren, and she’s running for the presidential nomination of the party she once derided. Warren’s upbringing in Oklahoma is a major part of her stump speech: She talks about how her father’s poor health forced her mother into the workforce in the 1960s and nearly cost the family their house; how she married at 19 and lost her first teaching job after she became pregnant; how her Aunt Bee saved her when she was struggling to balance the demands of motherhood and her burgeoning career in academia. She discusses her three older brothers, making sure to note that all of them were in the military and that two of them are Republicans. What Warren rarely—if ever—mentions, however, is that during this entire formative period of her adult life, she herself was a conservative. “She was very against a lot of governmental controls,” Cochran, who remained close with Warren through her 20s, told me. “She thought people should have the right to make all the money they could.”
Among longtime liberals, Warren’s political history could present a liability as the race nears its first votes. Unlike some of her top rivals, she cannot claim to have been fighting in the trenches of progressive politics for decades. Yet that very fact could, at the same time, be appealing to less ideological voters who may know little about Warren’s biography from before she burst onto the national political scene. Hers is the story of a convert, not a zealot. The decision to become a Democrat was anything but a default choice; she came to it only after years of study that challenged her more conservative assumptions about how the economy and the government worked. And
