Neil MacDonald in the Globe and Mail:
I've also seen Senator Elizabeth Warren up close.
It was in a
union hall in Kentucky in 2014. She was stumping for Alison Lundergan
Grimes, the Democrat who was trying to unseat Senate majority leader
Mitch McConnell, but Grimes might as well not have been in the room once
Warren — the tiny, intense former Harvard professor — took the stage.
Elizabeth Warren fully intends to change the system, and says so.
When
she said how good it felt to be with working people in a workers' hall,
you knew it wasn't a platitude. When she talked about taking on the
venality of corporate America, you knew she meant it. As she talked,
plainly and without the usual dumbed-down patronizing, the small talk in
the crowd died. People stared. When she finished, they roared.
The
only speaker I have ever seen hold a crowd like that was Lucien
Bouchard, speaking to audiences of Quebecers in 1990 about the betrayal
of the Meech Lake Accord.
Both
politicians burned with intelligence, and radiated principle. Neither
gave a toss for political triangulation. Both left their listeners
convinced they meant what they said and would do it, and that to them,
only the people mattered.
If you are not Canadian, the reference to Lucien Bouchard will pass you by. But if you are and remember 1990...well, look up Bouchard on the net.
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