Elizabeth Warren lost her dream job but gained a path to 2020 via nytimes
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.
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.
“There aren’t that many people who can say they had an idea, wrote about it and ended up bringing it to fruition, in terms of the creation of a whole new government agency with a very focused mission,” Axelrod said. In the interview, Warren — an upbeat presence on the campaign trail — became somber when the conversation turned to her exit from the bureau. Asked about her insistence against having a farewell party, her eyes began to glisten.
Back at Harvard, where she was teaching law, Warren began considering a new idea: a proposal for a government regulator to address the issue on which Congress had spurned her advice — the problem of consumer credit and the often-deceptive financial products being offered to ordinary people. “In the U.S. today it is not possible to buy a toaster that has a 1-in-5 chance of bursting into flames and burning down a customer’s house,” Warren wrote in her draft. “But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same 1-in-5 chance of putting the family out on the street — without ever disclosing that fact to the homeowner.”
But the document, issued days after Obama’s inauguration in 2009, was unmistakable in its suggestion. The report recommended creating a financial regulator that could gather up the fragmented enforcement tools of the federal government and seek to avert another financial crisis.
At times, Warren’s appeals were strikingly personal: Over dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Warren told Jarrett much of the life story that is now familiar to voters who follow her campaign, a tale of deep economic adversity for her family in Oklahoma. “It put in context why this policy was so important to her,” Jarrett said.
In the House, Warren blessed deals struck by Frank, including one exempting banks with less than $10 billion in assets from certain new regulatory requirements. The concession was intended to win over an influential trade group, the Independent Community Bankers of America, and its chief lobbyist, Cam Fine. The arrangement dismayed the left — until Warren endorsed it.
“You cannot play the role she was playing without making people mad at you,” said former Rep. Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat involved in drafting Dodd-Frank. He said of the Obama economic team, “Those were folks who were used to getting their own way and not having to deal with critics at all.”
“I said: ‘That’s just not right. Do you want me to start a campaign? Do you want me to demand a meeting over at the White House?’” said Fine, whose offers Warren declined. “She put on a brave face.” Nelson, who is supporting Biden in the Democratic primary, said in an interview that he worried about empowering someone he saw as a champion of “runaway government.”
Sheila Bair, a Warren ally who was then at the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, said she had been angry to learn the White House was leaning against nominating Warren. Her detractors in the administration, Bair said, had been “whispering behind the scenes that she couldn’t get confirmed.”In the end, Obama concluded Cordray stood a better chance of clearing the Senate. Republicans would stonewall his nomination until 2013.
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