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Senator Elizabeth Warren is a populist, Democratic Party-style. She has long been an advocate for ordinary citizens against corporate interests. She was the brains behind the Consumer Protection Bureau, which—until the Trump administration de-clawed it—endeavoured to curtail the predatory ways of credit card providers. She’s introduced a bill which would force corporations to let workers elect 40 per cent of their boards and never tires of slapping down CEOs. At one congressional hearing, she told the head of Wells Fargo, a bank which illicitly opened accounts in its customers’ names without obtaining their permission, that he should resign: “At best you were incompetent, at worst you were complicit.” She pressed for Wall Street banks to be prosecuted, saying, “I’m really concerned that ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial’.”

Warren’s an intellectual, a lawyer, an uppity woman in the style of Hillary Clinton, and now she’s running for president.

The question is, though: do Democrats really want to nominate a 70 year-white academic from the Bernie Sanders School of New England progressivism? The 2018 midterm results suggest the African Americans, Latinos, and suburban women who are now the backbone of the party crave more youth and diversity. Beto O’Rourke, the congressman from Texas who nearly beat arch-conservative Ted Cruz for the US Senate in 2018, oozes charisma and speaks perfect Spanish. New Jersey’s Cory Booker, an African American, graduated from Stanford, Yale and Oxford. He’s made racial justice one of his signature issues in the United States Senate. O’Rourke is 46; Booker is 49. And with a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, Sen. Kamala Harris, 54, is a walking argument for American immigration. A former prosecutor and rock-ribbed supporter of reproductive rights, Harris comes from California, a rich source of Democratic primary votes.

Warren isn’t a fresh face the way O’Rourke, Booker and Harris are. She isn’t a cause celebre like Sanders, whose college student followers still think Clinton stole the nomination from him in 2016, nor would she exude Obama nostalgia like former Vice President Joe Biden, whose working class appeal might draw the Rust Belt back into the Democratic fold. Warren is sharper-angled, less affable, less like a cool grandparent and more like an admired, but also intimidating, university professor.

Nevertheless, Warren is a contender. She says she means to…

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