Elizabeth Warren, a great American story: she transcended her floppy-tied youth to achieve great things

Tonight I did some phone banking for Elizabeth Warren, who you may know is in a very tight race against incumbent U.S. Sen. Scott Brown. In a very deep-blue state, so blue that Mitt Romney has to distance himself furiously from his tenure as our governor, Brown is working his effective “reasonable man” and down-home pickup truck driver persona to try and convince Democrats that he’s more their guy than Elizabeth Warren. As a registered Independent, Amy gets mailers from Brown bragging about the bills he joined Obama in passing. And I admit that Warren has a bit of a cloistered-in-Cambridge air about her sometimes, and has not helped herself with this Native American ancestry business, and is maybe more of a national progressive dreamboat than the ideal fit for MA-SEN. (Hysterical New Yorker cartoon this week with politicians in baseball outfits says “Warren started her career in the Indians organization.”) But you know what? Warren did some great stuff starting the Federal consumer advocacy organization and isn’t afraid to talk smack about Republican extremism and Ayn Rand BS. She is smart and independent-minded, unlike the pathetic hack Democratic candidates who lost to Romney for Governor and Brown for Senator. And Scott Brown gets NO PASS for being pseudo-moderate: he caucuses with Republicans and gets a vote on Supreme Court Justices.

Proving yet again that the Amherst Class of 1991, especially that even more awesome group that lived in the now-demolished James Hall, is full of people conducting Lives of Consequence, I found myself at the phone bank with my James ’91 neighbor Stephanie. She said she was nervous before making the calls, and her husband said, “Just imagine you’re Sarah Miller, walking the mean streets of Reno for Obama: you have to get out there and get the information your candidate needs!” And that was enough to buck her up and get her dialing for “Strongly Warren” or “Strongly Brown” voters.

I never thought of myself as a political junkie but in recent years I’ve turned into that guy who waits anxiously for Nate Silver to update his 538 blog (now part of the NY Times), with its geeky noodling over polls, and hits refresh multiple times during the day on political blogs like Talking Points Memo. And tonight the dingy surroundings reminded me of when I first worked for a campaign back in high school, when Democratic tomato can John Milliken took on now-32-year (!) incumbent Frank Wolf (R) in the VA-10 district. Milliken got just 40% but I reconnected with a girl I knew in elementary school who agreed to go on what became my first date ever. That’s the passion that phone banking can create, people! By the way, props to Wolf for supporting oppressed Baha’is in Iran.

But actually the two actual conversations I had tonight were a very helpful reminder of the weird world of “high-information voting” I inhabit, and how different it is from most people’s lives and struggles. I talked to one lady who basically was just waking up to the fact that an election was coming up and said I was pretty much the first information she’d received about the campaign or either candidate. Wow. And then another lady talked plaintively about how worried she was about a Mass. teacher’s pension fund policy that somehow precludes her getting full Social Security pension coverage in case something happens to her husband. From my perspective, that has nothing to do with a U. S. Senate campaign, but it was a reminder that I have the luxury of worrying about a whole range of policy topics that don’t put me at immediate risk of my health or livelihood. For this lady, who wakes up every day worrying about the real possibility of losing her safety net, anyone from the President and Senate on down should tell her how they can help her out with her Mass. state policy problem. For sure, it won’t be Brown that looks to throw the teacher’s union a lifeline. I’ll be making more of these calls as I begin to heed Samuel L. Jackson’s advice to complacent 2008 Obama supporters.