Almost every day Elizabeth Warren comes out with serious policy proposals. They’re rarely even baby steps down the road to socialism, but most of them would make this country a better place. But lacking a media-friendly history of being a skateboarding “punk” rocker or a stint with McKinsey — and you might think, not being a man — she can’t get any attention for them. She can’t get out of the mid-single digits in the polls, and PredictIt, the political betting site, puts her chances of winning the nomination at 7 percent. She’s having trouble raising money; she lagged Mayor Pete in the first quarter funding haul even though he was a nobody who’d just entered the race.

Warren’s politics aren’t exactly mine, but this is sad.

I developed a serious respect for Warren about twenty years ago, well before she was famous. She was a law professor at Harvard who’d done a lot of work on why people file for bankruptcy. In 1989, she, the sociologist Teresa Sullivan, and fellow law prof Jay Westbrook, published As We Forgive Our Debtors, a detailed study of 1,500 bankruptcy filings in three states. Warren et al found that bankrupts were not driven by fraud or a simple unwillingness to pay — they were just broke, deeply in debt, and had no other options. That contradicted the assertions of the credit industry, which blamed the long rise in bankruptcy filings on the 1978 revisions to the bankruptcy code, which they saw as too debtor-friendly. It was too easy to wipe out debt, and the creditor class wanted to change that. I read the book and interviewed Warren and Sullivan as part of my research for a piece I wrote for the Nation in 1992 on the boom in going bust.