Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign was inspired by the man she’s hoping to replace, she says.
“When did you first think maybe someday I’d like to be president?” a woman wearing an “Elizabeth Warren” shirt asked in Iowa on Sunday.
Warren, 70, paused before the crowd of 1,200 gathered in Des Moines.
“It was when after Donald Trump was elected. And it was just that moment of, this is so deeply wrong. So wrong,” said the Massachusetts senator, first elected in 2012.
But Warren’s own 2017 memoir portrays an earlier timeline for considering a White House bid. In This Fight is Our Fight, the self-described reluctant politico recounts weighing a 2016 White House bid against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a conversation with her second husband Bruce Mann.
“For me, 2016 started back in early 2013, when people began asking if I was planning to run for president. Huh? I had been in elected office for only a few weeks. Before that, I’d spent a year setting up a federal agency,” she wrote, referring to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “The way I saw it, the question deserved a pretty simple answer: anyone who wanted to put themselves forward for president of the United States ought to have more experience than that.”
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The former Harvard Law School professor recalled how that didn’t stop “draft Warren” efforts emerging by January 2015. Despite the support, she said her “heart wasn’t in it” because she “wanted to learn her Senate job.”
But Warren still asked Mann “late one night” if he thought she should contest the White House.
“I don’t know if you should run,” he said. “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.”
She pressed him on whether he’d be OK if she ran, and he replied, “Yes.”
“I didn’t believe him, but it was the right answer,” she wrote. “Talking with Bruce and asking the question out loud had settled it. I wanted to stay buckled down and keep doing my job — my Senate job — as completely and as effectively as I could.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 78, who decided to challenge Clinton in 2016, has repeatedly railed against the Democratic National Committee for unduly influencing the nominating process to favor the former first lady that cycle.
