There are plenty of good arguments against running a presidential campaign the way Senator Elizabeth Warren is doing it, with a heavy emphasis on detailed policy proposals.

It’s not just that most voters can’t absorb all the details, though we probably can’t, and may not even really care about them. It’s also hard work, and in the frenzy of a campaign there are dozens more pressing demands for staff time and money. And it’s all too easy to make a small mistake in a policy detail that offends a key constituency or potential ally.

But so far, Ms. Warren’s “I’ve got a plan for that” campaign seems to have been worth it — at least in the sense that it has elevated her into the top tier of candidates in very early polls and nudged other candidates to get more serious and ambitious about their own policy proposals. For Ms. Warren’s supporters, it’s a point of pride: To back her is to treat politics as a matter of substance, to see beyond the shiny personal story and youthful charisma of candidates such as Pete Buttigieg or Beto O’Rourke, whom even a supporter recently described as “a blank slate that is waiting to be filled by our dreams and aspirations.”

But Ms. Warren is of course a personality, too, not just the human face on a binder of policy papers. The policy documents are the personality. What’s in them matters less than the fact that she cares enough to produce them, and the story they tell about who she is, how she made her way from Oklahoma, the University of Houston and early parenthood to Harvard Law School, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and the Senate — and how she would operate as president.