Opinion | Elizabeth Warren’s Formidable Stride

“ I don’t think that’s a bold idea,” she concluded. “I think it’s a bad idea.”

Don’t expect her to get any traction, though. She’s campaigning — admirably — in the realm of the doable. The dream-able is always going to be more vivid and romantic, and that’s where Warren dwells.

I worry lots about how Warren’s grandly liberal plans would play in a general election, but I’m impressed by her increasingly skillful navigation of the Democratic primary. Performance-wise, she’s pulling away from Sanders. He shouts and then shouts louder. She’s hardly quiet, but she has grown better and better at layering in personal anecdotes and dabs of humor, which he has never been any good at.

He still favors the word “oligarchic,” as if saying it for the zillionth time will finally make it roll off the tongue. She instead talks of “multinational corporations” and their corrupt chief executives, using more concrete images and language and doing, from a different end of the political spectrum, what Trump did with such effectiveness: identifying a class of villains on whom all of the country’s problems can be blamed.

She has learned to sail over and around potentially choppy waters. On Thursday night she spoke of her lifelong passion for education without giving the slightest hint of how much her positions on some education-related issues had changed over time. (She once supported vouchers, for example, but not one of her opponents onstage bothered to bring this up.)

She also refused to say whether Medicare for All would require a middle-class tax increase. One of the debate’s moderators, George Stephanopoulos, asked her, and then Biden pressed her, but she never grew flustered and never succumbed, instead stressing repeatedly that in terms of people’s reduced health care costs, they’d be ahead of the game.

You could call that deceptive. You could also call it disciplined. I shook my head but tipped my hat. She’ll be in this thing until the end.

This article has been updated.

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