Opinion | To Back Warren Is to Treat Politics as a Matter of Substance

The story her proposals tell is not just one of diligence, but also an ability to identify forces that don’t get much attention, don’t appear on polls and don’t have well-organized constituencies, but matter in people’s lives. In the mid-2000s, as a law professor, she sounded the alarm about proposed changes to bankruptcy rules, an issue on which there was almost no organized opposition to the interests of banks and credit card companies. That methodology is central to her identity.

And that’s appropriate. We don’t elect presidents just to execute plans; we elect human beings, expecting them to deal with global crises and economic twists we can’t yet foresee. For some, like Barack Obama, it’s inspiring, inclusive rhetoric that convinces us to trust them in that position; for others, it’s a personal story, such as military service. In the case of Donald Trump, to reach beyond his angriest core of supporters, it was the idea that he’d been so successful in business that he could do better than the “very stupid people” in Washington.

But policy plans and positions can serve the same purpose, showing that a candidate is prepared for challenges, able to absorb a huge amount of information and opposing views, and make decisive choices — the very thing a president does in a crisis.

There are other good examples of candidates using plans and issue positions to tell a story about themselves: When John McCain made campaign-finance reform a centerpiece of his 2000 and 2008 campaigns, it wasn’t because voters, particularly Republican primary voters, cared so much about the issue, in that pre-Citizens United era. The issue told the right story about Mr. McCain: a maverick willing to challenge leadership and lobbyists of his own party. Someone, furthermore, who had learned from his entanglement in the late-1980s Keating Five scandal (in which a group of senators were exposed for interceding with bank regulators on behalf of a donor). And someone willing to form cross-partisan alliances to get things done.

For others, especially in a wide-open field like the current Democrats, the policy positions they take are really markers of their political positioning: Will they be confrontational, proposing ambitious policies that no Republicans will support, or accommodating, as with some of the less controversial ideas in Senator Amy Klobuchar’s 137-point plan for her first hundred days?