Before I retired, especially after Atrius became involved with CMMI’s Pioneer ACO project, I made frequent trips to Washington. The Washington shuttle from Boston was always packed with people who looked like they were involved with very important business. It was more like a corporate bus ride than a trip for recreational purposes. As soon as the pilot allowed, everyone would open their briefcase, pull out their laptop, and work away for an hour or so before we were told that we were about to land and must put away our electronics.
I would occasionally see people on the flight, most seated in First Class, whom I could identify from seeing them on the evening news. In November 2012 I was excited and relieved when Elizabeth Warren defeated Scott Brown to regain Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate for Democrats. Not long after her victory, I was delighted to see her on an early shuttle flight to Washington. I did not see her board and I did not see her when I took my seat but just after we took off I noted her in her purple jacket sitting in the seat one row forward and across the aisle from my seat in coach. Ironically, what first caught my attention was not that Elizabeth Waren was seated an arm’s length from me, but that she was struggling to pull huge binders out of one of those lawyer’s document cases. After she had freed three huge binders she began to diligently review their contents. She seemed to read quite fast. Her yellow pen was marking huge sections of text, and she was scribbling notes to herself in the margins all the way to Washington.
My thought was, “Wow, she is a diligent lady! What a breath of fresh air.” I immediately had the sense that she must be doing important things, and I was proud that she was my senator. I was an admirer before I saw her and I have been an enthusiastic supporter ever since. I published why I voted for her in the New Hampshire presidential primary of February 2020. If you click on the link you can see Senator Warren shaking my wife’s hand. You can also read a previous report of my encounter with her on the plane. I reread what I had written this time about the encounter on the flight to Washington and was pleased to see that my story has not changed!
Over the last week or so Senator Warren has been making the rounds of talk shows to promote her new book, Persist. I have not read it yet because it will not be released until May 16, but I have preordered it from Amazon and I get a Kindle “preview” with my order. I have also listened to her excellent interview with Ezra Klein and watched her conversation with Trevor Noah on his show where she repeated many of the same thoughts that she had expressed to Ezra Klein. I realized that a book tour is probably like a campaign, the author puts her best thoughts together and delivers a consistent message with only minor variations from the script at each stop.
Whether she is repeating her sales pitch for her book or trying to sell herself as a candidate for president, she is one of our clearest thinkers. She is also more a crusader, policy wonk, socially responsible secular saint than a self-serving politician. Many politicians use their “origin stories” to try to convince voters of how great America is to have given someone like them a chance to lead. I have never had the sense that Warren has used her own remarkable story of her transition and achievement from a young mother from the lower middle class to a Harvard Law School professor and US Senator for any reason other than to demonstrate that she understands the problems people face and that she is motivated to use what she has learned and what she believes is right to help other people. As we all know there is no problem that exists for which she does not have a well-conceptualized plan.
I was a little miffed that the title of Lisa Lerer’s review of Warren’s book in the New York Times sounded like the book was a rehash of her loss of the Democratic presidential nomination and a list of her grievances about the extra challenges that a woman faces when running for president. The article is entitled “Elizabeth Warren Grapples With Presidential Loss in New Book: In “Persist,” the Massachusetts senator delves into gender issues and her own shortcomings after her failed bid for the Democratic nomination.” Deep in the article Lerer sees it differently when she writes the truth which contradicts her title:
Ms. Warren is determined not to wallow in her defeat, focusing most of the book on her policy prescriptions, some of which have been adopted by the new Biden administration. She offers reflections on the racial justice protests that roiled the country after the primary, devoting a significant portion of a chapter on race to her decision to identify as Native American earlier in her career — a “bad mistake,” she says. And she writes a moving tribute to her oldest brother, Don Reed Herring, attributing his death from the coronavirus last year to a failure of government.
“This book is not a campaign memoir,” she writes. “It is not a rehash of big public events. It’s a book about the fight that lies ahead.”
In the introduction I found much evidence to suggest that she has gained great wisdom from her reflections on what has worked in her life. The title of the book apparently comes from a message to her written in chalk which she found on her driveway the morning after she had withdrawn from the campaign for the presidential nomination. When she talks about persistence it is in the context of her battle for several years to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She writes:
“The first lesson I took from the fight for the CFPB was this: you don’t get what you don’t fight for. That agency didn’t happen just because it was a really good idea. It happened because we fought for it. The second lesson I learned was that during a crisis, the door to change opens just a crack. What had been impossible becomes hard-but-maybe-possible. That’s the moment to fight with everything you’ve got.”
I heard her use “during a crisis, the door to change opens just a crack” in both her conversation with Trevor Noah and in the interview with Klein.
Klein was very laudatory in his introduction to Senator Warren, but I don’t think his praise was misplaced or exaggerated. The fact is that because of her ideas and her dogged persistence she drives much of the progressive agenda. She is constantly applying all of her energy to pushing on a door that needs to open much more.
But the point is simply this: a lesson of the past 20 years is that what Elizabeth Warren is thinking about now is what Washington is going to be talking about next. And that’s the lens with which I read Warren’s new book, “Persist.” “Persist” is built around these identities Warren holds, or that she has held— mother and teacher and planner and fighter and learner and woman. But each of those identities is then used to make a series of arguments for the policies that we should pass. And a few of them, in particular, caught my eye. One is Warren’s effort to develop here a truly pro-family progressivism to put children and childcare at the center of the progressive agenda. And another is to change the lens through which we look at the economy, and particularly, the lens through which we look at inequality and distribution, by moving it from a focus on income to a focus on wealth. So in this conversation, I wanted to draw those ideas by drawing on another of Warren’s identities, which is policy wonk. This is just a much weedsier conversation than most politicians will have or can have.
Click here if you want to hear the hour-long conversation or read the 9,000-word transcript.
In what follows she brings her perspective to every issue before us now from childcare to global warming. She sees how they are connected to each other and how the way we manage the issues that she “has plans for” will determine our national and individual experiences for decades to come. After a long discussion with Klein about federally funded daycare she says something that applies to all of her policy work:
To me, this is what policy is all about. You have to think about these pieces, put them together, and say, let’s make changes now at the federal level that we can make, that we should make and that will make a difference for this country and put us on a track, both for more opportunity for individuals, but also, collectively, a stronger, more productive economy.
As the interview unfolds, they proceed through the issues talking about housing, federal forgiveness of student loan debt, the Black/White wealth gap, and the connection of these issues to prior public policies that aggravated inequality. She talked about how we can finance all of the things we need and simultaneously promote equity. They touch briefly on bipartisanship and the future of the filibuster as well as tax policy. They do a remarkable job of covering every issue in less than an hour.
There is no doubt in my mind that much of what appears in President Biden’s economic plan as seedlings of change were germinated from the ideas that she has promoted and will persist in promoting. There is no question that Warren believes that there is a fair solution within America’s resources for every problem we have and that if we want an America that has better health with anything like the dream of the Triple Aim and greater economic health for everyone, we must take advantage of the opportunities this moment provides. She sees the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the associated social unrest following the death of Geroge Flloyd plus the challenges of climate change as opening the door of opportunity just a little bit and that we most lean against that door and persist in our efforts to open the door to the future even more.
In her introduction she uses another metaphor:
“I’m not naïve. I know that the headwinds will always be fierce and that change will always be hard. But a crisis like the financial crash in 2008 or the pandemic in 2020 shakes up the embedded order. In a crisis, people are forced to stop saying “This is how it’s always been” and consider a new thought: “This is how it could be.””
Further along, she writes:
“This remarkable moment is an opportunity for change but not a guarantee that it will happen. It is a rare chance to think hard about the policies we want to change, especially the policies that touch our lives every day and set the boundaries for much of what happens to each of us.”
Many people object to her because she is too “strident.” I think they mean persistent. She is nobody’s fool. She has “been to the theater.” She knows the road toward implementation of what she cares about will be hard.
“Nothing we do will be easy. No one with power will give it up readily. Our battles will be hard. Sometimes we’ll find ourselves in a knife fight, and we’ll need our sharpest weapons. But more than anything, the toughest fights will demand that we bring our whole selves. We must bring energy and determination. We must bring clarity of purpose and a richer understanding of our common goals. We must bring a deep-down commitment that will sustain us even when the fight looks impossibly hard.”
A final quote from her “introduction” that impressed me sums up Senator Warren’s philosophy and what I think is the real message of the book.
“I write knowing with absolute certainty that if we fail to make major changes, we will plunge our nation and our planet into an abyss from which we cannot escape. I also write with a deep thrum of optimism that we are in a moment when extraordinary changes are possible.”
Reading the introduction of Persist has been an emotional lift. I am eager to read the whole work. Senator Warren is all about understanding the problem, formulating a solution, and persisting against opposition to change until change occurs. She gives me great hope that the door to the future has cracked open just a little and that she will be leaning on it until we can all walk through a wide-open door to a better tomorrow. She looks and sounds a little bit like a “Pollyanna” but remember that she brings a knife to the fight.
A Note To My Loyal Regular Readers
Change is hard, but for some time I have been struggling with whether or not I should cut back a little in my writing. I have decided to suspend the Tuesday note for a while. If there is something that I feel that I need to say that can’t wait until the Friday letter then I may surprise you on any day of the week. I won’t be reading or thinking about the issues less but I will have a little more flexibility in my weekly schedule. For instance next week I will have more time to focus on my granddaughter’s graduation from Ransome-Everglades Academy in Coconut Grove, Florida where she has been an athletic and academic star! Thank you for your loyalty, and be sure that the Friday Healthcare Musings will continue!
