February 9, 2019

On the steps of Everett Mills, the site where one hundred years ago mostly migrant women walked off the job and won better living wages and working conditions from greedy mill owners, Senator Elizabeth Warren announced that she was officially running for president in 2020.

Coming out to the song "9 to 5" by Dolly Parton, that ode to women's fight for empowerment in the workplace, Warren launched her campaign with a speech promising to address all the ways that the system is rigged against the working class and for the elites. Her platform was a combination of social justice and economic populism that kept the crowds worked up, despite the freezing temperatures.

Over 44 minutes in sub-freezing temperatures, Warren described a political elite "bought off" and "bullied" by corporate giants, and a middle class squeezed so tight it "can barely breathe."

"The man in the White House is not the cause of what is broken, he is just the latest and most extreme symptom of what's gone wrong in America," Warren said of President Donald Trump. "A product of a rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else. So once he's gone, we can't pretend that none of this ever happened."

Warren was introduced to the stage by Rep. Joe Kennedy III. Kennedy's endorsement was a bit of a surprise, given his close relationship with Beto O'Rourke, who is expected to decide on his own candidacy some time this month. Also attending was Sen. Ed Markey, Rep. Lori Trahan, Lawrence Mayor Dan Rivera and Boston City Councilor Michelle Wu, which gave Warren's candidacy a bit more credibility despite the continuing questions about her claims of Native American heritage.

In 2016, Warren was the most often cited woman in many voters' expressions of disapproval of Hillary Clinton: "I'd vote for a woman, just not this woman." Given her poorly conceived notions of playing on the right's field by taking a DNA test (every family has a lore and oral history of their background; few are absolutely correct), it remains to be seen if the left will embrace her as "the" woman or turns her into another that woman. Nevertheless, Elizabeth Warren will persist.

Elizabeth Warren's 2020 platform is available online and will be fleshed out more as we get closer to the primaries.

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