CLAREMONT, N.H.—Elizabeth Warren wants the look on her face to be funny. It’s somewhere between stern and confused and disappointed, complete with fists briefly on her hips, like she’s playing a mom in a commercial who just found an adorable kid making a mess on the floor.
That’s how the senator from Massachusetts responds late Friday when I ask her what she thinks will happen if the rest of the Democratic primary field doesn’t follow her lead and put talking about the economy at the center of their campaigns.
“I don’t know how anyone could not talk about the economy—and corruption!—and diagnose what’s wrong in America today. I just don’t know how they could do it,” she said, then added with a little snark creeping in to her voice, “Good luck …”
Read: Elizabeth Warren doesn’t want to be Hillary 2.0
The long photo line was done, and she was still standing on the small platform where she’d just done an hour-long town hall in front of 300 people. They’d come out on a cold night to the (naturally) Common Man restaurant, which offers free crackers and cheese out of big crock jars in front of the dining room and New Hampshire beer on tap. She’d started by laying out her three-part pitch to change Washington, to change the economy, and to change the rules of politics—and not just “little pieces around the margins, little nibbles here,” she said, but “big structural change in this country.” She’d ended with another thread of her stump speech, placing herself in an American tradition that connects abolition, women’s suffrage, and the civil-rights movement: “They organized, they persisted, they made real change.”