Warren surges in race for nomination
Elizabeth Warren’s favourite line about becoming the first female president of the United States drew the biggest cheers as she showed the self-belief shared by an increasing number of Democrats that she is the woman to defeat Donald Trump.
‘‘From the White House there is much – oh, I love saying this – that a president can do by herself,’’ she told her audience of Native Americans who responded with a standing ovation in Sioux City, Iowa.
Polling suggests that the 70-year-old Massachusetts senator may have been written off prematurely in the race for the Democratic nomination as too leftwing or too hamstrung by her dubious claims of tribal ancestry, which led to her being ridiculed by Trump as ‘‘Pocahontas’’.
Warren’s response was to launch a barrage of detailed policies aimed at helping working and middle-class Americans in their daily lives and delivered with passion and precision in the relatable style she honed as a university law professor. She has so many policies that her frequent quip ‘‘I’ve got a plan for that’’ became a catchphrase.
Launching before any other serious candidate at the start of the year, she has surpassed her main rival on the left, Bernie Sanders, the 77-year-old democratic socialist who ran Hillary Clinton close in 2016 and who opened up the Democratic party to more radical policy debate.
Now Warren may be set to overtake the frontrunner Joe Biden, 76, with an Economist-yougov poll last week putting the former vice-president on 21 per cent, a point ahead of Warren. The gap between them has been narrowing for weeks. One indication of her success has been Trump’s revival of the Pocahontas jibe.
He came up with the nickname because Warren referred to herself as an ethnic minority on some university employment forms, which she said was because of a family history of a Cherokee ancestor.
Trump offered to donate US$1 million to charity if Warren took a DNA test which she promptly did, only drawing further taunts from him when the results showed her Native American heritage was six to ten generations back.
Despite this, 57 per cent of Democratic voters are convinced that she would ‘‘probably beat Donald Trump’’, a 14-point jump since June, although still behind Biden on 65 per cent.
Warren is adept at weaving a folksy yarn about her family life growing up in Oklahoma.
Her homespun anecdotes are one key difference with the rhetoric of Sanders, who prefers to hammer his audience with statistics to show the injustices of capitalism.
Warren’s rise has come as Biden’s campaign seems to be flagging, with talk of him being urged to appear less frequently after a series of gaffes, such as mistakenly believing he met survivors of a school massacre while vice-president when the shooting actually took place last year. Sources in his campaign are said to be worried that he makes mistakes later in the day when he gets tired. – The Times