Warren’s comparison between herself and Perkins was nearly explicit. (At one point, she referred to Perkins as “one very persistent woman,” a callback to an early tagline for Warren’s campaign). Her campaign reached out to Perkins’ grandson, Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, who gave them barn boards from the Perkins’ homestead. Aides said they used the boards to construct the podium Warren used on Monday.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/rubycramer/elizabeth-warren-new-york-speech?__twitter_impression=true

If winning the Democratic nomination requires wooing the party’s progressive wing and harnessing the power of activist women, then Senator Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that. At a rally in New York City’s Washington Square Park on Monday evening, just hours after she beat Senator Bernie Sanders for the coveted endorsement of the Working Families Party, Warren laid out a far-reaching anti-corruption plan that rooted her campaign in a long history of women reformers.

But the speech also served as a road map for her path to the nomination, positioning Warren as the only candidate in the race who can knit together the women voters and progressive activists who propelled the Democrats to midterm victories in 2018...The location of the speech was symbolic. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire—in which 146 garment workers, most of them immigrant women, burned to death in 1911—would become a turning point in both the women’s and labor movements, accelerating women’s suffrage and leading to labor reforms that protected workers. It was also, as Warren pointed out in her speech, a wake-up call for young Frances Perkins, who witnessed the fire and became a crusader for worker’s rights before becoming the first woman to serve in a President’s cabinet, as Secretary of Labor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

...Merging the progressive critique of unchecked capitalism with the promise of the first woman president could be Warren’s path to victory in the primary. Sanders is “saying the same things as her, but from a man’s point of view,” says Adrian Bey, a 45-year old fashion designer who voted for Sanders in 2016. “You can get more flies with honey than with vinegar,” he says. “Not to say Bernie is vinegar, but she’s definitely honey.”

...Supporters say that this playbook—merging external activism with practical political maneuvering—makes Warren more likely to get things done. “That has been the Working Families Party theory of change,” says Nelini Stamp, the Director of Strategy and Partnership for the Working Families Party. “We’ve elected candidates to office and if they don’t do what our people have demanded, we hold them accountable. We’ve done the inside-outside game for a long time.”

On this night, even Warren’s podium was symbolic. It was built with wood salvaged from the Perkins homestead, crafted by a Warren grassroots donor who owns an all-woman woodworking company, and modeled after the soapboxes that organizers would speak from during the early labor movement. It was 46 inches tall, for the woman who wants to be the 46th President of the United States.

More at https://time.com/5678605/one-woman-and-millions-of-people-to-back-her-up-how-elizabeth-warren-made-fighting-corruption-a-feminist-rallying-cry/

NEW YORK ― Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) drew thousands of New Yorkers to her presidential campaign rally Monday in Washington Square Park, where she discussed her plans to fight corruption and support workers nationwide.

The Democratic presidential hopeful honored the scores of mostly immigrant women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 — which occurred about a block from where Warren spoke Monday — and praised the women’s trade unions that fought for change in the wake of the tragedy.

“We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men,” Warren said, referring to the park’s iconic arch looming behind her, which is named for President George Washington. “In fact, we’re not here because of men at all. We’re here because of some hard-working women. Women who, more than a hundred years ago, worked long hours in a brown, 10-story building a block that way.”

...“It was one of the worst industrial disasters in American history,” Warren said. “One of the worst, but it should not have been a surprise.” Working conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were infamous, but the company’s owners were wealthy, politically connected and corrupt, she said.

“They made campaign contributions and talked with their friends in the legislature,” Warren said. “They greased the state government so thoroughly that nothing changed. Business owners got richer, politicians got more powerful, and working people paid the price.”

“Does any of this sound familiar?” she asked the crowd, which responded with an affirmative cheer. “Take any big problem we have in America today and you don’t have to dig very deep to see the same system at work.”

More at https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5d7ff77de4b077dcbd62cf5e/amp

WASHINGTON Joe Biden praised pharmaceutical companies on Saturday, offering a line that could draw pushback from Democratic opponents who have demonized the industry's focus on profits.

"By the way, great drug companies out there except a couple of opioid outfits," the former vice president told donors at the Dallas home of David Genecov, a craniofacial surgeon.

Biden's comment came during a discussion of medical research and the cancer "moonshot" initiative he launched during the Obama administration following the death of his son, Beau Biden, in 2015. That effort included his push for companies to collaborate more on research. But he sounded a discordant note in praising the companies themselves and not the research he intended to praise specifically given the near-universal agreement in both parties that companies set drug prices too high, and given his own efforts to further regulate the industry.

...His top two rivals, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have demonized pharmaceutical companies for what they consider putting profit over patient care.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-tns-bc-biden-20190915-story.html

After a Democratic presidential debate in July, MSNBC host Chris Matthews interviewed Elizabeth Warren and tried relentlessly to get her say that if we pass Medicare-for-all, taxes would go up. She refused to give him the sound bite he was after, insisting that the real question is whether the total amount people pay for health care — through taxes, but also in premiums, deductibles, and co-pays — goes up or down, and she insisted that total costs would go down for most people.

At Thursday’s debate it happened again, but this time it was ABC’s George Stephanopoulos acting as though it was of pressing importance to get the words “Taxes will go up” to pass Warren’s lips...Warren is obviously determined not to give people like Matthews and Stephanopoulos what they’re after. The question that interests me is, why are they so determined to get her to say that taxes would go up?

...If the question you’ve put to a candidate winds up in an attack ad against them, you’ve done your job. The fact that Republicans would attack Warren for saying “Taxes will go up” is precisely why they want to get her to say it. There’s also a degree to which TV anchors and pundits offer an unspoken acceptance of a basic Republican idea, that taxes are somehow uniquely bad. You can see it in the way Matthews pressed Warren, acknowledging that total costs may go down but saying he didn’t really care, because what matters to him is whether taxes go up.

Which, when you think about it, is utterly bonkers. The average insurance premium for an employer-provided family plan is nearly $20,000 a year. If that’s what you were paying, and I told you that I could give you back that $20,000 but your taxes would go up by $10,000 so you’d wind up with $10,000 more than you had to begin with, and you replied, “No deal — I don’t want to pay higher taxes!” you’d be a complete fool.

More at https://beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/13/why-it-is-so-important-get-warren-say-ill-raise-taxes/#comments-wrapper

Harris: My first grade teacher, Mrs.. Francis Wilson, God rest her soul, attended my law school graduation. I think most of us would say that we are not where we are without the teachers who believed in us. I have offered in this campaign a proposal to deal with this, which will be the first in the nation, federal investment, in closing the teacher pay gap, which is $13,500 a year. Because right now, in our public schools, our teachers, 94% of them are coming out of their own pocket to help pay for school supplies. and that is wrong.

I also want to talk about where we are here at TSU, and what it means in terms of HBCUs. I have—as part of my proposal that we will put $2 trillion into investing in our HBCUs for teachers, because—because—because, one, as a proud graduate of a historically black college and university, I will say—I will say that it is our HBCUs that disproportionately produce teachers and those who serve in these many professions—

Moderator: Thank you, senator.

Harris: —but this is a critical point. If a black child has a black teacher before the end of third grade, they're 13% more likely to go to college. If that child has had two black teachers before the end of third grade, they're 32% more likely to go to college. So, when we talk about investing in our public education system, it is at the source of so much. When we fix it, it will fix so many other things.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/9/12/1885188/-Kamala-Harris-brings-home-the-importance-of-black-teachers-in-our-schools-at-Democratic-debate

Former Vice President Joe Biden stood at center stage Thursday night, leading in the polls and earning the most attention from ABC’s debate moderators and his rivals alike. But Biden acted less like the front-runner than Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the candidate emerging as Biden’s chief rival from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. While many of the other candidates competed for audience attention with practiced zingers and dad jokes, Warren once again set much of the early agenda, defending her Medicare for All health care plan and swatting away the few attacks that came her way. For weeks, the debate seemed to promise a much-anticipated showdown between Biden, who has led polls from the beginning of the race, and Warren, the upstart progressive who is slowly chipping away at his lead.

Tellingly, when Biden was prompted to critique the Medicare for All plan that both Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have made cornerstones of their campaigns, Biden turned to Warren first — even though Sanders is the measure’s prime sponsor in the Senate. But Biden, in the language of the Senate, barely poked at Warren, whom he called “my distinguished friend, the senator on my left.” Through the more than two and a half hours that followed, that was the extent of their interaction, less a throw-down than a detente.

Warren, by contrast, was one of four candidates who did not attack one of her on-stage rivals. And, reflecting a frustration among some other Democratic campaigns who have failed either to match Warren’s steady rise or to land a jab on her, she was one of the few who was not attacked herself, with the lone exception of Biden’s gentle poke.

...Through three rounds of debates, where others have found momentary success in lobbing broadsides at their rivals on stage, Warren has not. She has emerged as the most confident in her own agenda, and the most capable of setting the agenda to which the rest of the field responds. On Thursday, where Biden consulted his notes and corrected himself, Warren parried skepticism over Medicare for All when a rival or a moderator raised a question. Where Biden studiously obeyed the time limits, Warren barreled through the yellow and red warning signs to land her final points.

Warren still trails Biden in most state and national polls, though many of those surveys show Biden’s advantage narrowing. Where Biden played defense, the other candidates seemed unable or unwilling to take on Warren directly. That included Sanders, who stands the most to lose to his longtime friend as they both compete for votes among the most progressive set within the Democratic electorate. Sanders routinely turned to Biden, finger waving, nearly shouting. The one time he mentioned Warren, it was to amplify her point about the political power of the gun lobby.

More at https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/461260-warren-isnt-leading-polls-but-at-debate-she-looks-like-frontrunner