NORFOLK, VIRGINIA—“I have to tell you all: running for president, it’s just an extraordinary experience,” Elizabeth Warren said on stage Friday night under the Old Dominion scoreboard at Chartwell Arena in southern Virginia. This was after she’d been speaking for about an hour to the crowd of about 4,000 who’d turned out waving banners reading “Dream Big, Fight Hard” and wearing shirts with the scolding phrase once directed at her that has become a feminist rallying cry, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

Just then, a man toward the back of the floor shouted out: “We love you Elizabeth Warren!” and the cheering in the crowd swelled up. “I am just gonna say, it’s extraordinary. It’s extraordinary because this is the moment. This is our moment...”

“So many of my friends are diehard Trump supporters,” says Virginia Trager, who lives in Westmoreland County, about two hours’ drive north, standing with her daughter and her grandson. “I just don’t understand how they can support somebody that is flaunting illegal behaviour. Throwing the emoluments business down the tubes. I just don’t understand. These are people that say they support our troops. And when you have the Kurds being abandoned,” she said, “I don’t know what’s happening. So we’ve got to make a change.” In pursuit of that change, Trager says next year she’s voting “blue no matter who” (in reference to the Democratic party’s traditional colour) but has been impressed by Warren. “I love her. She’s great. She’s got a lot of plans. She knows your business. She’s done her homework.” She said of being in this arena hearing Warren and seeing the crowds, “Feels like democracy is still working. I’m not sure how long, but it feels like it’s working.”

...“Fairly progressive-minded Liberal” Tim Roth, a local man in his 60s who remains undecided in the primary race, decried the level of nasty polarization in the rhetoric. “I’m kind of as disgusted as at any time in my adult life. America, obviously, we’re polarized. I think it’s going to be challenging. Let’s put it this way. If one of the most progressive and open-minded candidates in my opinion was president for eight years, Barack Obama, and he couldn’t really move the needle much in terms of polarization, like, good luck. That said, I think Warren has the strongest chance so far of breaking through that lockdown because she’s proposing some ideas that are truly on paper bipartisan,” he said. “I think that’s kind of out-of-the-box thinking we’re going to have to have.”

...Cara, a 17-year-old from Virginia Beach and a Warren supporter from the beginning of the campaign who cited struggles with health insurance for her ailing mother as one of the motivating factors in her political viewpoint, summed up the emotion of being in this arena with a crowd cheering a surging Warren campaign. “I feel very at peace. I think that I feel very calm right now being in the presence with all these people that I feel similar to how I do.”

After the speech, after questions from the audience, when the arena lights came up, the night wasn’t over for the candidate or for many of those who’d come to see her. As is her campaign tradition, Warren vowed to stay and take selfies (“the core part of democracy,” she joked) with as many people as wanted them. The line contained hundreds waiting, at this moment that the candidate spoke of, for their moment beside her.

More at https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2019/10/19/elizabeth-warren-is-finding-her-moment.html

Billionaire Michael Novogratz has a message for his rich friends: Stop worrying so much about Elizabeth Warren.

“You’re not victims, you’re the richest people in the world,” said Novogratz, the former Goldman Sachs partner who’s now investing in cryptocurrency as founder of Galaxy Investment Partners. “How in God’s name do you feel like a victim?”

...“Ninety-seven percent of the people I know in my world are really, really fearful of her,” Novogratz, 54, said in an interview at a benefit for Hudson River Park Friends, of which he’s chairman. “They don’t like her, they’re worried about her, they think she’s anti-rich,” Novogratz said of the senator from Massachusetts. “It’s a little carried away.”

For Novogratz, plans to take from the rich to give to those who are struggling make sense.

“The way the country is functioning today, the bottom 60% aren’t doing well,” said Novogratz, who has supported Democrats in the past. “She’s speaking to that group. She wants to redistribute. Bernie’s a socialist, Elizabeth says she’s a capitalist, she just wants to redistribute more. And I think we’re going to have more redistribution.”

More at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-18/novogratz-says-wealthy-worried-about-warren-should-lighten-up?srnd=premium

https://twitter.com/VicStoddard/status/1102387779097354242

... After multiple media reports Tuesday night and Wednesday morning that U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, had joined Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in endorsing U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders for president, Tlaib tapped on the brakes.

"I have not made any endorsement at this time," Tlaib said in a statement to the Free Press, adding that she is planning to bring Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont, to her Detroit-based district on Oct. 27 for a tour.

Tlaib's office also said that she is not planning to be part of a Sanders rally in New York City this weekend despite reports that she would be. Instead, she is expected to be at a rally of progressives in Lansing.

Sanders' campaign confirmed the trip to southeast Michigan, though no other details were released.

That doesn't mean Tlaib won't endorse Sanders, only that she hasn't done so at this time. Recently, Tlaib welcomed another Democratic presidential candidate — U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — and the two talked about environmental hazards in the district and filmed a Facebook piece together.

More at https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/10/16/rashida-tlaib-bernie-sanders-endorsement/3997815002/

On Tuesday night, 12 candidates crammed onto the stage at Ohio’s Otterbein University. It was the first time that all of the remaining Democratic presidential hopefuls have shared the same stage on one night.

But the attention was almost all focused on one candidate, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has emerged as the frontrunner after a slow and steady rise in her support, and who has crystalized her position in recent months as the party’s intellectual and ideological center of gravity. Questions were framed around her policy positions, her past statements, her agenda; other candidates staked their claim to positions almost exclusively in relation to where Warren stands. Even on the rare occasions when Warren was not speaking, not directly being spoken to, and not being spoken about, her dominance hung over the conversation, making itself known in unexpected moments. At one point, a moderator, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, addressed another contender – Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar – by Warren’s name. Klobuchar smiled and graciously deflected, but within minutes, she was bringing up Warren herself.

...She was attacked by Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg over how she plans to pay for Medicare for All. She was attacked by Andrew Yang over her plan to break up big tech and enforce a strict anti-trust agenda. She was attacked by Kamala Harris, who alleged that Warren was hypocritical for, of all things, not calling on Twitter to suspend Donald Trump’s account. She was attacked by Joe Biden for supposedly being “vague” on Medicare for All. She would have been attacked by Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for her lack of military experience, except Gabbard was cut off by a moderator.

For the most part, Warren weathered these attacks with patience, grace, and an agility in her rhetoric that rivals that of a gymnast on a balance beam. She refused to take the bait repeatedly offered to her by moderators and other candidates, who attempted to goad her into saying that she would raise taxes to cover Medicare for All. This denied her opponents a video clip that they could use to discredit her; instead, she hammered home the larger point that total costs would go down under her plan. She refused to get mired down in the petty point of whether or not Twitter should suspend Donald Trump’s account; instead, she focused on how Big Tech companies have too much influence over our politics to go unregulated. She wouldn’t concede Andrew Yang’s dubious assertion that unregulated tech giants encourage innovation; instead, she focused on the ways that monopolies in all sectors of the economy—she cited agriculture and pharmaceuticals—need to be broken up to protect consumers.

It was a front runner’s strategy, a deflection technique meant to avoid inconvenient commitments and stymie the attack strategies of her rivals. Warren made moral cases instead of economic ones, refusing to get mired down in the kinds of specifics that can only be communicated poorly and haphazardly to voters within the confines of the contentious debate format. To make her case in a general election, she will have to become more willing to communicate the specifics of her multitudinous plans on a mass scale, more ready to get down to brass tacks on television and on the debate stage. But Tuesday’s debate was her first as the object of rivals’ ire—before tonight, her opponents had more or less held their fire against her. The discipline and poise she showed in this newly antagonistic role bodes well for her performance in a general election against the erratic and taunting Trump. He will bait her and goad her, and she will be able to calmly and convincingly remain on message.

More at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/16/elizabeth-warren-attacked-democratic-debate?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

https://twitter.com/EmmaVigeland/status/1183798607121715203

https://twitter.com/RebeccaKKatz/status/1183785014577815553

https://twitter.com/jwestin2/status/1183835819775332352

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren danced to Aretha Franklin and posed for selfies as she marched Friday night in the Las Vegas Pride parade.

The Massachusetts senator, who is gaining momentum in the crowded field of White House hopefuls, was the only candidate to appear at the parade in the early voting state.

Nevada, which holds presidential nominating caucuses on Feb. 22, is the third in line to cast votes for the Democratic nominee.

Warren, wearing a rainbow-hued feather boa, walked Friday night behind a banner with supporters and her campaign staff, cheering, raising her fists and dancing. But she frequently broke away from the marchers and ran to the sides of the parade route to give out hugs and pose for photographs. She would then sprint back to her spot behind the banner, drink a swig of coconut water, and keep going.

Warren did not make any comments or hold any other public campaign events in Nevada Friday.

Other Democratic presidential candidates sent family members on their behalf and had supporters marching carrying their signs.

More at https://kdwn.com/2019/10/12/warren-marches-in-las-vegas-pride-parade/