Warren takes campaign to Iowa
Senator fights Trumpism without dropping his name
ANKENY, Iowa — Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s first presidential campaign foray to this early voting state merged the economic views she has honed for years and the lesson learned by successful Democratic candidates in the midterm elections two months ago.
She aimed directly at voters tempted by President Donald Trump’s angry populism in 2016 but avoided mentions of Trump himself almost entirely.
“Our 2020 issue will be how we talk about what we stand for,” Warren said when asked why she was not taking on Trump, something she has not been shy about doing in the past.
For Warren, virtually every position she advocated was, in policy terms, a repudiation of the president and the course he has set for the nation in his first two years.
That was true from specifics — her demand that presidential candidates release their tax data, which the president has refused to do — to the generic — her repeated lament that the middle class has been hollowed out as economic and political fairness has been lost.
She connected issues that galvanize the left under the idea that America’s political and economic system is “corrupt” — the precise word used in 2016 by both Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — and that is preventing working-class families from getting ahead.
Implicit in that was criticism of Trump and, more broadly, of politics as practiced in Washington.
“The heart of it is this question of corruption,” Warren told a crowd in Sioux City on Saturday. “Every issue that affects us in this country right now ... they intersect with this fundamental question of who government works for.”
The senator from Massachusetts made nearly identical pitches on her five-town, three-day tour of the western side of the state, projecting energy and eagerness to engage with voters even as she was hobbled by a cold that made her voice raspy. She spoke to crowds that totaled about 2,700 people during the trip — addressing each for about an hour.
Before she entered politics, Warren was an academic studying consumer bankruptcy, and much of her focus in office has followed that vein. But as she outlined her agenda in Iowa, Warren expanded beyond that: She proposed an anti-corruption bill that would ban lawmakers from becoming lobbyists, advocated stronger unions and touted a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote.