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In early October 2011, Shannon Sherman, a pregnant nurse who was two weeks from her due date, met Elizabeth Warren, though she didn’t know it at the time. All Sherman knew was that a friendly woman said hello to her in the ladies’ room at the Massachusetts Nurses Association’s annual conference, asked how far along she was, and shared a chuckle about the difficulties and indignities of the ninth month of pregnancy. Sherman had heard of Warren; the previous summer, the nurses' union had been among the first to endorse the Democrat in the 2012 Senate race, just after she left a job in Washington overseeing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.* Like many progressive groups, the union was eager to encourage Warren to jump into the race for the Senate seat Ted Kennedy had held for 47 years until his death in 2009. Scott Brown, a Republican, had won a special election in January 2010, and Democrats were still aghast over it.

But Sherman wasn’t thinking about all that when the woman in the restroom told her she looked great and wished her luck with the baby. There was no air of importance to signal the presence of a Senate candidate, or a nationally known bankruptcy expert, or the architect of a new federal agency. Sherman thought the woman could have been anybody. She seemed like nobody at all.

But then, a bit later, that woman was addressing the conference. After Warren’s speech, Sherman went up and thanked her. The next day, Sherman—who was chair of her local union chapter—found out that Warren wanted her to give the introduction at the campaign’s kickoff fundraiser. The event would be that night at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston’s gilded Back Bay. A still-surprised Sherman told the audience of roughly a thousand people about meeting Warren the day before and said that Warren would fulfill promises to make America a better country for her soon-to-be-born daughter. When Warren stepped up to the dais, she quipped to the audience, “I think it’s clear that the balance of power is shifting from the golf course to the ladies’ room.”

It was this unassuming charm, combined with her national reputation as a champion of the middle class and foe of Wall Street, that had led Massachusetts progressives to lobby Warren to enter the race. She had spent the previous five years transitioning from a Harvard law professor who studied bankruptcy to the country’s best-known expert on consumer financial products and regulation. After co-writing a book with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, on bankruptcy and the middle class in 2003, she’d become a telegenic expert on the financial travails of everyday families. (Full disclosure: Tyagi is chair of The American Prospect’s board of directors and is chair of the board of the magazine’s publishing partner, Demos.) Like Sheila Bair and Brooksley Born, she’d been a Cassandra in the years leading up to the financial crisis, warning that a disaster like the mortgage crash was coming.

Elizabeth Warren’s ability to speak about financial issues in clear, human terms that anyone could understand made her seem almost preternaturally media-savvy. When she made her second appearance on The Daily Show in January 2010, host Jon Stewart confessed to having the same crush on her that so many liberals had been developing. As she talked about the need for stronger regulations to help consumers, she brought the conversation around to the passion that fueled her work: “This is America’s middle class,” Warren said. “We’ve hacked at it, and chipped at it, and pulled on it for 30 years now, and now, there’s no more to do. Either we fix this problem going forward, or the game really is over.” Stewart said: “When you say it like that, when you look at me like that, I know your husband’s backstage—I still want to make out with you.”

Warren had become a Washington superstar without losing her everyday-ness. Chatting with a young nurse in the ladies’ room showed a genuine friendliness; asking that nurse to open her campaign signaled that she was determined to bring a common touch to her burgeoning political career. At 62, she still carried herself like a lanky teenager. Her light-blond hair had been kept in the same neat crop since she first started to appear in documentaries and on talk shows. She’d taken to rolling the sleeves of her jewel-toned jackets halfway up her forearms, as if she were ready to dig into some hard work: “Well, I guess I’ll just fix this country myself.”

A month before the Copley event, Warren had spoken to a small group of supporters in a private home in Andover, Massachusetts, and one of the attendees posted her remarks on YouTube. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” Warren told them. “Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” Warren leaned forward as she spoke, brows wrinkled, hands gesturing and almost shaking, as if she were holding back even more emotion. “You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

The crowd at the Copley had seen that instantly famous homemade video, a clip so popular that it had served as an unofficial, viral campaign launch. The video encapsulated why liberals saw Warren as the next great champion for the cause. For so long, conservatives had been unabashed about their ideology; here, finally, was a liberal doing the same on a national stage. At the kickoff, Warren’s theme—as it would be for the entire campaign—was a variation on her “Nobody got rich on his own” speech. First, though, she offered a bit of biography: that she was the daughter of a janitor in Oklahoma, that her three brothers had served in the military, that she had married her high-school boyfriend at 19, had a child at 22, and was the first of her family to graduate from college. Her first career was as a special-education teacher. She went to law school and graduated in 1976, making her way to Harvard in 1995. “From daughter of a maintenance man to fancy-pants Harvard Law School professor,” she said, “America is a great country.”

The crowd ate it up. These folks—the sweatered professors, the Beacon Hill Brahmins, the working-class women from Rockland, the professional young women from Boston—were the first to come out and support Warren. They relished the chance to run a financial reformer against a senator who’d taken more money from banks than almost any other member of Congress. They had voted for Barack Obama, and he had disappointed them—especially with his tepid efforts at reform after the bank bailouts. Warren was the antidote, the real thing: In Washington, on cable TV, on NPR, she had given Americans a crash course on why the federal government needed to go back to the post-Depression reforms that both Democrats and Republicans had been so eager to undo for the past 30 years. Massachusetts Democrats, and liberals across the country, saw in Warren what they no longer saw in Obama—someone who talked about the country as if it needed not just a change in leadership but fundamental repair.

The evening had started for Warren at 5:30, when she met with the biggest fundraisers, those who had brought in the maximum amount of $2,500, in a smaller room in the same hotel. It was well after 9 before she was done saying thank you to every last person who waited until they could shake her hand. That would, it seemed, be like a pact, a physical manifestation of their fervent hope that Warren wouldn’t let them down the way Obama had—that she wouldn’t let it change her. She had only a couple of campaign staffers at that point, and they kept trying to nudge her out of the room, but there was always someone else to say hello to. A friend called out, “Liz, have you eaten? Get that woman some food!” Finally, on her way back toward the hotel entrance, Warren veered over to the concierge desk to shake hands with the bellhop. When she made it into a car and left the hotel, she was officially on the campaign trail.

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