It is still the late winter of 2019, and nobody's eaten a single corn dog at the Iowa State Fair yet. I have to keep reminding myself of this because the 2020 presidential campaign is already at MACH 2 and climbing. Just on Monday night, there were three solo candidate appearances. MSNBC had Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, back to back, the latter in a town hall format, and CNN had Senator Professor Warren, from the campus of Jackson State in Mississippi, which was an interesting choice on the part of her campaign.

Booker had a solo spot with Chris Matthews, whose questions, as usual, seemed designed mostly to send candidates spinning off into strange and unfamiliar regions of thought. Booker obliged, criticizing senators who brag about their experiences smoking dope, an oblique shot at Kamala Harris, and trying to tie that criticism to the issue of criminal-justice reform. It's a bold pivot, if a startling one.

We have presidential candidates and congresspeople and senators that now talk about their marijuana use almost as if it’s funny. But meanwhile, in 2017, we had more arrests for marijuana possession in this country than all the violent crime arrests combined.

Matthews also got Booker to deny he was a socialist—this, it appears, is going to be the primary bug up Matthews's nose during this cycle—and to say that, if elected, he would not pardon El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, which is putting the cart about two states over in front of the horse, but, what the hell, it made for an interesting answer, especially when Matthews posed a follow-up in which he asked Booker if he wouldn't pardon the president* to "unify the country."

Again, Booker pivoted like vintage Hakeem Olajuwon.

This is why our justice system has lost so much legitimacy. We have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. There’s a whole bunch of people that, if I’m president, that I’m looking to pardon or who are being punished unjustly in this country.

In other words, the president* can get in line behind thousands of people doing time for weed, which seems fair.

Senators Booker and Harris listen during a Senate hearing. Win McNamee Getty Images

This was my first time seeing Gillibrand outside of the dignified chambers of the Senate and, Lord above, is this woman wired. For someone who'd fallen a bit off the radar, and who only officially announced her candidacy this weekend, Gillibrand talked like someone who wanted to cram all of January and February into one hour in March. She was sharp and engaged, and she handled two of the toughest questions of her campaign—her transformation from upstate New York conserva-Dem to born-again liberal #MeToo foe of gun violence, and her role in the defenestration of Al Franken—extremely well. Especially the latter issue, which she framed with a discussion of how she'd explained it to her sons.

As a mother, I have to be very clear. It is not OK for anyone to grope a woman anywhere on her body without her consent. It is not OK to forcibly kiss a woman, ever, without her consent. It was not OK for Sen. Franken and it is not OK for you, Theo. Ever. So I needed to have clarity. And if there are few, Democratic powerful donors who are angry because I stood up for women who came forward with allegations of sexual harassment, that’s on them.

As for SPW, it was fascinating to watch an audience that was so far from her political experience get to know her. When Jake Tapper asked her if Mississippi should drop the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag, and she answered, simply, "Yes," it brought down the house and even got Tapper to admit that it was the most direct answer he'd ever received from a politician.

Whoever the CNN director was Monday night, that person deserves a raise, because the cutaways to the audience while SPW was doing her "OK, let me tell you about that..." thing on one topic after another always showed at least a couple of people nodding along, as if to say, "Yeah, I get it now." This happens all the time during her campaigns. A teacher is a teacher is a teacher, I guess.

Warren speaks at a gathering in New Hampshire. Barry Chin/Globe Staff Getty Images

Also, anyone who's covered either of her Senate campaigns has heard the story about her father's heart attack and The Dress, but I don't think she's ever delivered it with such obvious emotion. But there was another moment when, comfortably in her wheelhouse, she dropped what I think is the line of the campaign so far. It wasn't her call for an end to the Electoral College, although that's drawn most of the next-day attention. It came when someone asked her the now-strangely-inevitable question as to whether or not she was a socialist.

"I believe in markets," she answered. "But I believe in markets with rules."

"Markets without rules is theft."

Somebody on her campaign should get an extra doughnut this morning for that line—repurposing the 19th Century French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's most famous axiom (La propriété, c'est le vol!/Property is theft!) as a call for a reinvigorated regulatory regime to safeguard the public welfare and break the power of corporations to cause widespread chaos and destruction. OK, Proudhon likely would be très en colère about her having appropriated his trademark aphorism for this purpose, but clearly, the crowd knew what she was getting at. That line should be in every speech she gives for the rest of the campaign. She should say it every day, whether she wins the election or not.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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