It’s a website: “Help us elect Elizabeth Warren for president in 2020.”
It’s a Facebook page: “Ready for Warren.” Which sounds like a knockoff of “Ready for Hillary”—but that might be the whole point. First woman president and all that.
It’s a brand-new book, because every Democratic party candidate for U.S. president has got to have a brand-new book. The Massachusetts senator’s is titled This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class. Its official publication date is April 18, but you can buy it right now, as you mourn the Martyrdom of St. Elizabeth at the hands of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. Here’s an excerpt from a blurb:
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Here’s an excerpt from a blurb for A Fighting Chance, Warren’s 2014 book, from the days when she was bruited as a candidate for the 2016 presidential election:
As I said, you’ve got to have a brand-new book.
It’s also a T-shirt. Or rather, a vast array of competing T-shirts, all retelling the events of Feb. 7, 2016, when McConnell invoked Rule 19, which prohibits a senator from impugning the character of another senator on the Senate floor. Warren was doing exactly that, as a vote drew near to confirm then-Sen. Jeff Sessions as President Trump’s attorney general. First she quoted from the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), who had called Sessions “a disgrace to the Justice Department” over his 1980s tenure as U.S. attorney in South Carolina. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Montana), presiding over the floor, warned Warren that she was on thin ice, Rule 19-wise. She then stared reading aloud a 1986 letter from Coretta King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow, that charged Sessions with trying to disenfranchise black voters during that period (Sessions had actually brought charges on behalf of other black voters who said their names had been counterfeited on ballots). At that point McConnell led a floor vote that barred Warren from speaking further. McConnell explained: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Red meat for Warren’s supporters, who promptly cried sexism and compared her to Rosa Parks in her refusal to move to the back of the bus, and also to Marie Curie, who never gave up on her quest to discover radium. Within hours entrepreneurs were grinding out “Nevertheless, she persisted” T-shirts in every size and color. One of them featured an image of Warren, her eyeglasses tactfully airbrushed away and her right arm boldly raised to the sky like that of the Statue of Liberty. The hate group-fixated Southern Poverty Law Center started selling its own “Nevertheless, She Persisted” T-shirt as a fundraiser—as though the $54 million the cash-bloated nonprofit takes in each year weren’t enough.
And finally, it’s a celebrity endorsement, another must for a Democratic party presidential candidate. The celebrity in Warren’s case seems to be Katy Perry, who wore a “Persist” armband while performing at the Grammy Awards on February 12.
And so the marketing of Elizbeth Warren, Presidential Candidate and Mitch McConnell Martyr, proceeds apace to 2020. It’s a remarkable feat for this early in the cycle, all the more remarkable because Warren can remind you more of your fifth-grade teacher catching you flying a paper airplane than of the kind of baby-kissing extrovert who usually gets the votes. But that just means it’s never too early get off to a good start—and Warren has.
