Elizabeth Warren Lost Her Dream Job but Gained a Path to 2020

[BeyondGeography]

She had a plan to take on big banks. In the fight to get it done, she honed the approach to politics that defines her presidential campaign.

Elizabeth Warren did not want a goodbye party. She told her aides there would be no grand send-off, no celebration of a mission accomplished.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been her idea from the start: a new arm of the government, uniquely empowered to police the kinds of loans and financial schemes that led to the Great Recession. Ms. Warren had detailed the idea in a journal article, then cajoled and pressured Congress to make it law. She was tasked by President Barack Obama in 2010 with setting up the bureau, and spent a year recruiting investigators and enforcers for an office they saw as an exhilarating cause.

But as spring turned to summer in 2011, Ms. Warren faced a wrenching separation. The White House had decided not to nominate her to lead the bureau permanently. So she gathered the staff for an “all hands” meeting and told them her work there was over. “She told us that we were ready to sail the ship, that we did not need her there, and that we would be able to do it on our own,” said Patricia McCoy, a Boston College law professor who was a senior official at the bureau.

Ms. Warren was right. Under her successor, Richard A. Cordray, the bureau would recover $12 billion for consumers from financial institutions by 2017. It would become, to supporters, a prized example of the government taking on big banks after the 2008 financial crisis. To opponents — Republican lawmakers, business associations and a few conservative Democrats — it would become an example of “runaway government,” an agency to be curbed at the first opportunity.

To Ms. Warren, the bureau is something else as well: a formative lesson in how an idea — a plan — can become reality. For it was through creating a new financial regulator that Ms. Warren developed the approach to government that now guides her presidential campaign. And it was in losing the chance to lead her bureau that Ms. Warren came to see the value of asking voters, rather than a president, to give her power.

A review of Ms. Warren’s role in creating the consumer bureau, including interviews with more than 30 people involved in the process, revealed an approach to politics that joins imaginative policy ideas with a keen instinct for mass communication and a willingness to negotiate. On one hand, she marshaled support from progressive activists and helped build public demand for her idea; on the other, she haggled with members of Congress to earn their backing.

David Axelrod, who was Mr. Obama’s top political adviser during the battle to create the C.F.P.B., called Ms. Warren’s role a “bona fide credential” for the presidency.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/us/politics/elizabeth-warren.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

[Roy Rolling]

1. The opposite of Trump

She is intelligent. Intelligent people learn from their mistakes, as well as being grinded in the gears of politics. That is real experience, the kind that makes a statesman, er, a statesperson.

She has the temperament and smarts, the exact opposite of an ignorant and churlish Trump.

She is the anti-Trump, and will need the protection of the Secret Service and the Divine to keep Trumpites from her.

And like many of the Democratic candidates, will certainly be a better president than Trump.

I just love her, but I am partial to teachers and professors. I believe they are being targeted to advance a Republican Idiocracy.

[KPN]

2. Warren is not a socialist or a "leftist". She's

a leader with moral conviction who gets things done. Elizabeth Warren is a pragmatist, a visionary (as demonstrated by her conception of the CFPB) and a communicator. She sees the failures and flaws in capitalism as it exists today. And she has the vision to construct — as well as the ability to communicate in simple and understandable fashion — logical and morally right solutions in order to right our listing capitalism and fulfill the basic job of government — helping its people.

Warren is a pragmatic leader. She may win this thing.

[AlexSFCA]

3. love her passion, energy and preparation

She is methodical, great communicator and teacher, understands that you can’t just discuss issues without providing solutions when you are running for president. I hope to see her support grow. She is head and shoulders above Biden as a senator (vs Biden as a senator). Consumer protections are extremely important and a national security issue. Equifax fiasco - foreign governments would have all our consumer data by now courtesy of dark web. We are swamped with endless robocalls, they have all of the important details: our phones, addresses, incomes, SS numbers, etc.

[IronLionZion]

4. That's when I first heard of her

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1989144,00.html

Republican opposition to her was relentless, so I figured she must have been doing something good for the people.

[BeyondGeography]

5. Bair and Warren were a great team

Both all-in for the little guy. Would love to see that revived.

[DemocracyMouse]

6. What's amazing is how she went from "nerd for the people" to "spirited nerd for the people"

I'll take the whole package. She has hit her stride and seems to have that glow of inevitability.

And damn she's smart.

[BeyondGeography]

7. That reminds me, her energy level is off the charts

This made me laugh (from the Politico hit piece, that ended up making many people like her even more IMO):

So when she returned to Washington in 2008 and became chairwoman of the oversight panel, the mandated monthly report became a monthly media tour. It would begin before dawn with an aide bringing her an Egg McMuffin but no coffee—“Can you imagine me on coffee?!,” she once asked an aide who asked why she didn’t drink it.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/12/warren-obama-2020-228068

[BlueMTexpat]

8. Love that anecdote!

Thanks!