The New York Times article Heaven Is a Place Called Elizabeth Warren will be something that Elizabeth Warren fans can appreciate.

Yet the author makes the typical pundit’s mistake that shows she still doesn’t get it and is trying to set up Elizabeth Warren for failure.  Here are two example paragraphs that highlight the author’s failure.

And yet, on a deeper level, her popularity makes perfect sense. Embracing Warren as the next “one” is, in part, a way of getting over Obama; she provides an optimistic distraction from the fact that under our current president, too little has changed, for reasons having to do both with the limitations of the political system and the limitations of the man. She makes people forget that estimations of him were too overheated, trust in his powers too fervid. As the feminist philanthropist Barbara Lee told me of Warren, “This moment of disillusion is why people find her so compelling, because she brings forth the best in people and she brings back that excitement.”

…

But many of the people looking to Warren, as they did to Obama before her, are expecting material things — like readable credit-card pitches or safe bridges or jobs or a vote on a bill to create jobs — that are, at the moment, figments as imaginative as dragons and their slayers. And that’s dangerous, because when the person we decided was going to fix it all isn’t able to change much, it’s not just that we get blue but also that we give up. We mistake the errors of our own overblown estimations for broken promises. And instead of learning, reasonably, that one person can’t do everything, we persuade ourselves that no person can do anything.

Those of us who understand reality and can really listen to what Elizabeth Warren says, understand that one Senator is not going to change the world.  We also know that Elizabeth Warren understands that.  She makes the point that Obama made and seems to have forgotten, that getting her elected is not the end of the struggle, it is just the beginning.  It is not enough to have her in the Senate and Obama as President trying to pass certain policies.  It requires the continual agitation of the people on these matters to get us anywhere.

By paraphrasing Franklin Roosevelt’s comment to A. Philip Randolph that Randolph and his people needed to put pressure on Roosevelt  to make Roosevelt do the right thing, Obama seemed to show that he understood.  What Roosevelt understood that Obama seemed to miss was that Roosevelt used his office to keep the electorate stirred up and on his side.  He kept encouraging the people to speak out.  It was not just a one time comment to A. Philip Randolph.

When Warren describes how she managed to get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau legislation passed, she talks about how she reached out to labor and other constituencies to form a coalition that would help fight for the legislation.  She makes no claim that her voice alone is what did it.

If the media could only listen to what she really says and help her set the expectations of the voters as to what is really required to get things moving in the right direction again, then she might succeed.

On the other hand, if the media continue to play their favorite game of raising people up on pedestals just so they can knock them down, then they are perpetuating their role as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Another way of saying that electing one person the Senate is not final step we have to take, we need to remember that electing Elizabeth Warren is but a necessary first step.  We must elect more like her, and we must keep fighting.  Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, Elizabeth Warren, and more to come, and we might finally start to make progress.  Right now we are only beginning to make progress on beginning to make progress.

What this pundit misses about Obama disappointment is that many of us would not be disappointed that he couldn’t get things if only he had put some real effort before giving up. He did not explain to the public exactly what he wanted to do and then rally them to his side. This is his biggest failing and my biggest disappointment. He also kept trying to compromise with an adversary that plainly said that it had no interest in compromise. He negotiated with himself to water down what he would even try before even going out to meet the opposition. Early on, the President declared, “I am no patsy.” The evidence shows that a patsy is exactly what he is.

Whatever Elizabeth Warren’s failings may turn out to be, I don’t ever expect that I will be disappointed because she turned out to be a self-defeating patsy. If I turn out to be wrong, I won’t have buyer’s remorse. From everything I can observe of all the candidates for Senator from Massachusetts, she seems to be the be least likely to disappoint.