The cost of that energy is that she will be asked to live up to a fantasy that has plagued other history-makers: that by virtue of being different from those who preceded her, she will govern differently.

“If you look at countries that have elected women presidents,” Barbara Lee told me, “very often, they’ve elected a woman when things were so bad they gave the woman a chance.” I suggested that the instance in which power is handed over only when it becomes so gnarled that it ceases to be any kind of power at all is a grim victory.

Lee nodded. “Whatever it takes,” she replied.

The question of what it would take for Warren to maneuver through the Senate is particularly prickly given that Warren’s aims sound as outsize, and perhaps as naïve, as the expectations of her followers.

“I don’t want to go to Washington to be a co-sponsor of some bland, little bill nobody cares about,” she told me. “I don’t want to go to Washington to get my name on something that makes small change at the margin.” Responding to my suggestion that she must run a grass-roots campaign in part because she won’t have support from banks, Warren said: “That’s absolutely true if you think the objective is to win. For me, it’s about more than that.”

And those last words, which edge into cliché, provide a hint of the central tension she’ll face over the next year. She has derived her strength from the candor and specificity of her speech, but that strength is sapped as soon as she starts dealing in the anodyne language of political campaigns. In the past, Warren has been clear that she doesn’t take to being reined in. At the start of a lecture she gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010, while she was setting up the C.F.P.B., she groused about living “in a world in which someone has to read my speech in advance.” Twenty minutes later, she went off-script, complaining, “I hate being tied to something; I feel like this is a boring speech.”

She insists that regulation of her words is less of a problem now that she’s a candidate, technically answering to voters and not to the federal government. But asked by phone if her communications team felt anxiety about her perceived liberty on this account, she replied, “Oh, they’re anxious, you bet,” and joked that she could hear her campaign spokesman “on the other end of this call, breathing heavily.”

You can see the transformation happening already. When pressed on what kind of formidable legislation she would actually pursue in the Senate, Warren’s organization served up a snoozy list of the priorities that Democrats have been talking about for years: she will push for spending on infrastructure, education and renewable energy. She will work to strengthen labor unions and advocate for the reregulation of the big banks while easing regulations that make it difficult for small businesses and community banks to compete with giants.