I was quite happy to receive an email from Mary Parsons at THE AMERICAN PROSPECT asking me if I had the time to do an illustration or two for a story on the education of Elizabeth Warren, currently running in Massachusetts against incumbent Scott Brown. Elizabeth Warren. Her observations from a good while back on the nature of many factors contributing to a company’s success became the basis for Obama’s now infamous and misinterpreted “You didn’t build that” speech. No stranger to Washington she nonetheless has been an outsider to the world of running for office. She’s up against a politically savvy opponent and she has committed her own share of mistakes in the process. Mary’s suggestion was to play it like some schoolyard scene. It was up to me to make it work. Drawing on my own memories of the stresses of grade school life, I worked up a few approaches of some naïve kid’s encounter with school yard bullies.
Warren has an interesting face to caricature. It’s wide open and almost painfully sincere often with a somber worriedness. The next thing was to play her body language against the collective language of the toughs. Besides the schoolyard I tried a new kid in the classroom approach as well. Both ways could have worked well in my estimation. Mary went with the schoolyard.
The main image needed a follow-up. I suggested one of the opener sketches that didn’t get selected, which focuses on the aftermath of the encounter. As the outcome of the election hasn’t happened yet we couldn’t treat the spot with any sense of finality. We could comfortably say that the experience has not been a breezy one for Warren so far.
