Warren has been traveling the country to promote her latest biography. Warren the message machine

Chances are, Elizabeth Warren has already answered your question.

The freshman Massachusetts Democratic senator has been everywhere the past few months, appearing on an impressive list of Sunday shows and cable news programs, chatting up late night talk show hosts and crisscrossing the country on a book tour to promote her latest biography, “A Fighting Chance.”


But if you thought the media blitz may have loosened up the popular liberal — famous on Capitol Hill for her strictly-on-message persona and her aversion to making small talk with the D.C. press corps — think again.

Warren has focused with iron discipline on promoting a narrow set of core priorities — cracking down on Wall Street, helping student borrowers and giving the middle class more financial opportunities — while stubbornly refusing to get sucked into the political controversies and media obsessions of any given day.

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This self-control, most recently on display during the book promotion, underscores why she has been able to maintain her loyal following since joining the Senate: Warren sticks with what works for her and avoids the senatorial impulse to weigh in on any and everything that has tripped up so many before her.

It’s also an approach that could pose real limits in the event that Warren decides — as she insists she will not — to become a national candidate and take on a role that requires her to weigh in daily on a much broader range of issues.

“There’s an impressive element of discipline in the fact that she just doesn’t want to talk about politics and 2016 because if she does, that’ll be the whole story and she knows it,” said Bob Shrum, the veteran Democratic political strategist who was a speechwriter for the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. “If she pivots away, then the story can be about what she wants to be about. So that’s what I think is happening here.”

In one interview after another during her book tour, the ex-Harvard Law School professor has displayed tenacious discipline, sticking close to a well-rehearsed script.

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Pressed over and over to express critical or even conflicted views on Hillary Clinton, Warren has remained unshakably on message. “Hillary is terrific” has become Warren’s go-to response to a range of probing queries about the former secretary of state.

Appearing on the “Late Show With David Letterman” last week, Warren was all-business, discussing the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; the origins of the 2008 financial crisis; and the urgent need to lessen the overwhelming burden of student loans.

During the first months of her book tour, there were some lines Warren liked to recycle in one interview after another.

“We’ve got a Washington that works for those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” on April 20.

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Several days later on “CNN Tonight,” Warren told Bill Weir: “Washington works for those who can hire an army of lobbyists and an army of lawyers.”

Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” the following month, she lamented to Bob Schieffer: “Washington works for anyone who can hire an army of lobbyists and lawyers.”

Yahoo News correspondent Katie Couric, one of the journalists to sit down with Warren, recently tried repeatedly to find a sliver of a crack in the senator’s rhetorical routine.

“I’m curious if you think that Hillary Clinton is too cozy with Wall Street. I know you’ve disagreed with her in the past on issues like bankruptcy legislation,” Couric began.

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“You know, I worry a lot about the relationship between all of our regulators, government and Wall Street, and here’s how I think of this –“

“What about Hillary Clinton in particular?” Couric cut in.

“Well, I worry across the board and here’s part of why …”

And she was off, lamenting the outsized power that lobbyists hold over elected officials in Washington; the unfortunate lack of accountability for big banks who helped bring on the 2008 financial crisis; and the plight of Main Street Americans struggling to get a fair chance in a system that is simply “rigged.”

ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos didn’t have any better luck more than four months ago when he interviewed the senator on “This Week” just days after her book’s release. He directed no fewer than three consecutive questions to Warren about whether Clinton is too sympathetic to big business interests.

“Well, I’m going to keep talking about this issue and I’m going to keep pushing on this issue,” an unfazed Warren responded after Stephanopoulos’s third try.

No matter how many times the interviewer presses her to say something — anything — fresh about a national Democrat or the political headlines of the day, Warren reliably and with ease pivots away, rerouting the conversation to one of the core issues that preoccupy her time in the Senate.

Warren’s laser-like focus on the issues she’s most passionate about has been at the core of her public image since her first days in the Senate.

Her public profile took off in the aftermath of the financial crisis, when Obama tapped her to lead the effort to set up the CFPB. When the administration eventually chose to nominate former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray instead of Warren to become the bureau’s first director, she decided to challenge former GOP Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

The campaign had plenty of rough patches — most notably, Warren was harshly criticized for her handling of accusations that she used her Native American heritage to gain a professional advantage. In “A Fighting Chance,” Warren writes that it was during the 2012 Senate campaign that she learned the painful lesson of what can happen when a politician lacks strict discipline with the media.

“I was deeply embarrassed,” she wrote in reference to one Daily Beast article that quoted her as taking some credit for inspiring the Occupy Wall Street movement. “My words sounded so puffy and self-important.”

Republican political strategist Mary Matalin said zeroing in on her core audience — rather than trying to capture the general public — was a smart political move for Warren.

“Why would she want to take a position on all the Obama inanities of late?” Matalin said. “Staying out of the contemporaneous events, which are almost all in uncharted waters (from the sluggish recovery to the foreign policy implosions) while keeping her name out there is surprisingly smart of her, given her track record.”

A representative for Warren did not respond to a request for comment.

The media’s obsession with Warren’s views on national Democrats and the major issues facing the party leading up to 2014 and 2016 speak to the senator’s growing presence on the political stage.

With a devoted fan base on the left that would like nothing more than to see Warren’s name on the party’s national ticket in 2016, it is becoming increasingly clear that the senator will be a formidable force in the next presidential election — regardless of whether she herself is a candidate for the White House or not (“I am not running for president,” Warren has said countless times this year).

She has been using the midterm elections to build up her national party credentials, stumping for congressional candidates like Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and West Virginia Democratic Senate candidate Natalie Tennant, who is running for Senate against GOP Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, in recent months.

Speaking as a surrogate for these fellow Democrats, Warren has tapped into the public anger towards big banks and the government post-2008, speaking about the familiar themes that she explored in her book and recent media interviews.

“I also have seen Congresswoman Capito in action on the House Financial Services Committee, and time and again I have watched her side with powerful financial interests over working people,” Warren said at a campaign event for Tennant in July.

In the eyes of Wall Street reform advocates, Warren, perhaps more than any other public figure in Washington, has unmatched power to draw national attention to proposals such as breaking up big banks by reinstating a version of the Depression era Glass-Steagall law — and maybe even make them relevant in the 2016 elections.

“Hillary Clinton as the front runner on the Democratic side is already attracting unwanted attention about her funding from large banks,” said Bart Naylor, a financial policy advocate at Public Citizen. Warren is “the most if not one of the most astute people on banking issues in Congress,” Naylor added. “I think arguably she will at least lead some of the discussions toward those issues.”