With Elizabeth Warren emerging as a key rival to Joe Biden for the 2020 Democratic nomination, her husband of nearly 40 years is emerging into the public glare — whether the Harvard Law School professor wants to or not.
The Massachusetts senator, 70, and her second husband this week sat down for their first joint interview of her 2020 presidential campaign, which polls show to be an increasingly close contest with the former vice president and Deleware senator. The CNN interview with the potential first couple showed Warren taking the lead on most questions, with Mann, a legal history scholar, being prodded to avoid discussing openly political topics.
At one point Mann, 69, was asked why he believed his wife was leading some surveys of voters nationwide, as well as in the crucial early-nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Warren has been quick to dismiss good or bad numbers with reporters ever since she announced her exploratory committee outside their Cambridge home on the last day of 2018 before formally launching her White House bid in Lawrence, where her campaign in headquartered, in February.
"And you remember, we don't do polls," she reminded him.
The pair appear to have a genuinely warm relationship — they were spotted walking hand-in-hand ahead of the highly-anticipated Democratic debate last month in Houston. Yet the "polls" interaction represents a broader theme of their dynamic in which she is the dominant force, with him in a supporting role.
Mann often accompanies Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor, as she crisscrosses the country imploring Democrats to back her efforts to become the party's presidential nominee next year, juggling his own legal professorship at the Ivy League institution.
"My sweetie, my husband Bruce, is here somewhere. He's wearing a blue shirt. Where are you? I'm checking to make sure he's still here," Warren joked at a town hall last weekend in Rock Hill, South Carolina, prompting some in the crowd to shout his name until they were able to find him.
Mann has been at the side of Warren, who provided federal oversight of the banking bailout and spearheaded the setup of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and her career, almost since their first meeting at the age of 29 during the summer of 1978.
The couple have different accounts of their initial encounter at an economics and law conference in Florida. Recently separated from her first husband Jim Warren and a mother of two young children, Amelia, then 7, and Alexander, then 3, she was teaching money courses at the University of Houston Law Center and he American legal history and property topics at the University of Connecticut Law School.
"A lot of people might think that two young law professors would be drawn together because they wanted to talk about law all the time. Nope: I fell in love with Bruce because he had great legs," Warren wrote in her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance.
They married two years later in 1980 after Warren, who kept her first husband's name to "make life a little easier for the kids," proposed to him at the end of a class she saw him lead in Connecticut.
"In an act of recklessness that still startles" her, Mann abandoned his job on the East Coast to move in with her and her family, which included her parents and aunt, in Houston.
[Opinion: Elizabeth Warren is going to be the last man standing]
The pair then embarked on a decade-long struggle to find two jobs in the same city, shuttling back-and-forth from Houston and then Philadelphia for teaching and research opportunities at the University of Houston, the University of Texas at Austin, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Warren and then Mann were eventually both offered gigs at Harvard, but they resumed their two-city life when Warren was appointed chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, became a special adviser to the CFPB, and won her first term representing Massachusetts in the Senate.
Warren's relationship with Mann appears to be a role reversal from her first marriage.
Elizabeth Warren met Jim Warren, a mathematician who worked for IBM and NASA before starting a DNA testing company, in Oklahoma City when she was 13 and he was 17. They were debaters at Northwest Classen High School, and she describes him as "the first boy I'd ever dated — and the first to dump me."
The pair rekindled their romance in 1968 after he graduated from college and the senator, then 19, was in her second year at George Washington University. He asked her to marry him, she said "yes in a nanosecond" because she was "amazed and grateful" he had chosen her, and within eight weeks she had given up her full-ride debate scholarship and moved to Houston to be with him. Amelia was born three years later when Elizabeth was 22.
Their marriage became strained by her desire to finish college at the University of Houston, work as a special needs public school teacher, enroll as a student at Rutgers Law School — the family relocated to New Jersey for a period for Jim Warren's job — and then to become a law professor. They separated after 10 years together.
"I had failed him. He had married a 19-year-old girl, and she hadn't grown into the woman we had both expected. I was very, very sorry, but I couldn't change what I had become," she wrote in A Fighting Chance. "I loved every new adventure I took on — and he didn't."
This week's interview marks a shift for Warren, who wrote in her 2017 book This Fight is Our Fight that she nixed the idea of contesting the White House in 2016 because of concerns regarding the scrutiny her family would face after a bruising 2012 Senate election against Republican incumbent Sen. Scott Brown during which her weak claims to Native American ancestry came under attack.
In her second memoir, the senator recalled the discussion she had with Mann in 2015 about a potential bid. "I don't know if you should run. I know there are a lot of things you care deeply about, and I know sometimes you have to fight. That's just who you are. But a race like this one looks pretty terrible. The Senate thing was bad enough, and running for president would be worse — a lot worse," Warren quoted Mann saying.
Warren and Mann this week described how they revisited the conversation ahead of the 2020 cycle, the senator soliciting the thoughts of her closest advisers, including her husband.
"She saved me for last, and finally, she asked me for three reasons, pro and con. And I said, no, I'm not going to do it," Mann said. "I said, you're going to run anyways. Because if you don't run and Democrats lose, you'll feel guilty because then that means there'd be no one to fight for the people and the issues that you care about."
As Warren continues to climb in the polls, Mann will find it difficult to dodge the political spotlight.
Andrew Och, who has written books on first ladies, told the Washington Examiner it was unsurprising Mann had "an equal or maybe less dominant role" in their relationship because of the type of people who generally seek the White House. While Bill and Hillary Clinton and Herbert and Lou Hoover bucked the trend, Och cited former Hewlett-Packard CEO and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, whose husband Frank retired early from AT&T to support his wife, as another example.
"If you're running for president, your spouse makes up all the things that you don't have that voters are looking for. You take these people either consciously or subconsciously as a pair," he said. "Whether we like it or not certain people of certain demographics are going to be looking, so how's her husband going to help here. We would almost, unfortunately, expect a husband to help his wife in the role of president more than the traditional first lady."
