(snip) {There} are the outward manifestations of what her campaign has put together out here.... She draws enormous crowds and enormous ovations from those crowds. People see her and holler, unbidden, "Big Structural Change!"—the tagline for all her now-famous syllabus of plans. They chant, "Two cents!", the amount of each dollar over $50 million she proposes to tax to finance the implementation of those plans ... And, in the polls, she can't be said to have had a "moment" yet, but her rise has been steady, easing fears that she might be peaking too soon. She is now a solid second to Joe Biden, and it is still only August.

But the thing that's sold Elizabeth Warren to Iowa is primarily Elizabeth Warren. None of the candidates seems to be having as much fun as she is. The endless selfies after speeches. The pinky-swears with young girls about how what girls do is run for president. Her willingness to hold town halls anywhere. That loose-limbed, almost goofy wave with which she steps onto every stage. In a gloomy political time, with a humorless sociopathic bully in the White House, and with all the worst impulses of the national Id come out to play, Senator Professor Warren is the campaign's happy warrior, the teacher everybody hopes they get when school starts up again in the fall. People respond to the good feeling around her campaign as much as they respond to the blizzard of policy proposals that campaign has loosed upon the electorate.

She is a liberal academic who lives in Massachusetts, but she is not a Massachusetts Liberal in the easy caricature that has been so useful to the Republicans over the last 40 years. She is neither a quiet technocrat like Michael Dukakis nor a chilly WASPish icon like John Kerry. She is Oklahoma, born and bred, and it shows in the easy way she connects with audiences here. She is not Harvard. She is someone who went to two public universities before she ever got there. There is none of the distance, none of the archness, common to Ivy League academics.

And the people who come expecting a Dukakis or a Kerry come away happily surprised. And the people who come away expecting an ivory-tower Harvard lecturer leave feeling smarter, and experiencing the conquest of learning in a way they haven't felt it since elementary school. None of this is to say what may happen when the guns really open up on her, but it is to say, for now, that Elizabeth Warren is running a campaign of hope and optimism and enthusiasm as surely as did Ronald Reagan, that ol' Iowa radio guy, in 1980, and as surely as Barack Obama did in 2008.