The Virtual Candidate
Elizabeth Warren isn’t running, but she’s Hillary Clinton’s biggest Democratic threat.
BY RYAN LIZZA
The relationship between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, the Party’s most likely Presidential nominee, goes back to the second half of the Clinton Administration. Warren told me recently that the most dramatic policy fight of her life was one in which Bill and Hillary Clinton were intimately involved. She recalls it as the “ten-year war.” Between 1995 and 2005, Warren, a professor who had established herself as one of the country’s foremost experts on bankruptcy law, managed to turn an arcane issue of financial regulation into a major political issue.
In the late nineteen-nineties, Congress was trying to pass a bankruptcy bill that Warren felt was written, essentially, by the credit-card industry. For several years, through a growing network of allies in Washington, she helped liberals in Congress fight the bill, but at the end of the Clinton Administration the bill seemed on the verge of passage. Clinton’s economic team was divided, much as Democrats today are split over economic policy. His progressive aides opposed the bill; aides who were more sympathetic to the financial industry supported it. Warren targeted the one person in the White House who she believed could stop the legislation: the First Lady. They met alone for half an hour, and, according to Warren, Hillary stood up and declared, “Well, I’m convinced. It is our job to stop that awful bill. You help me and I’ll help you.” In the Administration’s closing weeks, Hillary persuaded Bill Clinton not to sign the legislation, effectively vetoing it.
But just a few months later, in 2001, Hillary was a senator from New York, the home of the financial industry, and she voted in favor of a version of the same bill. It passed, and George W. Bush signed it into law, ending Warren’s ten-year war with a crushing defeat. “There were a lot of people who voted for that bill who thought that there was going to be no political price to pay,” Warren told me.
Warren is not running for President. But she is mounting a campaign to insure that Clinton and other prominent Democrats adhere to her agenda of reversing income inequality and beating back the influence of corporate power in politics. These are issues that Warren has pursued for three decades, as an academic, a policy adviser to Democrats, an Obama Administration regulator, and, since 2012, a U.S. senator and the anchor of a progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Clinton has taken notice. Last December, she invited Warren to a private meeting at her Washington home, near Embassy Row, to hear Warren’s advice on issues such as income inequality. In recent months, members of Clinton’s policy team have consulted with Dan Geldon, one of Warren’s closest advisers, about economic policy. And a few days after Clinton’s official announcement, on April 12th, that she is running for President, she wrote a paean to Warren in Time, saying that Warren “never hesitates to hold powerful people’s feet to the fire: bankers, lobbyists, senior government officials and, yes, even presidential aspirants.”
Clinton even sounds like Warren these days, evidently hoping to fend off charges that she is a captive of Wall Street money and influence. In the video in which Clinton announced her candidacy, she says, “The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.” Two days later, during a stop in Iowa, she noted, “Hedge-fund managers pay lower taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80, when I was driving here over the last two days.” And in a fund-raising e-mail she wrote, “The average CEO makes 300 times what the average worker makes.”
Clinton’s people insist that any similarity to Warren is coincidental. “Hillary was talking about rising inequality and how the deck was stacked against people in 2007 and 2008,” Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, and a policy adviser to Hillary Clinton, said. “I see a lot of overlap. I do not see a causal link from one person to the other.” The Warren camp seems to have a different view. Last week, Warren’s advisers privately circulated a picture showing the two women sitting beside each other, a quote bubble emanating from Clinton: “What she said.” When I asked Warren last week if she believed that Clinton was co-opting her message, she hesitated and replied, “Eh.” She added, “She’s laying out her vision for the country and she deserves an opportunity to do that.” Warren may have decided not to run because she felt she couldn’t win. But Clinton’s populist turn signals another possibility: Warren feels that she can accomplish more from the sidelines.
“I think she’s doing exactly the right thing,” Barney Frank, the former congressman from Massachusetts, told me recently, referring to Warren. “Right now, she’s as powerful a spokesperson on public policy as you could be in the minority.” Frank worked closely with Warren in the House on financial-reform legislation to curb the power of banks. “She has an absolute veto over certain public-policy issues, because Democrats are not going to cross her. And if she were to even hint at being a candidate that would be over.” He added, “Democrats are afraid of Elizabeth Warren. No Democrat wants Elizabeth Warren being critical of him.”
Warren believes that, when it comes to economic policy, there is a Wall Street view and a Main Street view, and Democrats must choose sides. Her critics argue that this is simplistic and naïve, but she has buoyed many on the left who are critical of President Obama’s economic policies and advisers for being excessively influenced by Wall Street. Warren was especially unimpressed by the President’s first Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, who was appointed at the start of the financial crisis. “I was shocked that he picked the person who had just done the bailouts through the New York Fed,” she said. “I assumed that the President would want to carve a different path, and want to separate himself from the Republican-led bailout.” She added, “Tim Geithner came from the New York Fed, which, effectively, works for Wall Street.” (Geithner declined to respond on the record to Warren’s criticism of him.)
In the final year and a half of the Obama Administration, Warren will continue to take on the President over issues such as international trade and his choices for Treasury Department positions, but she will be focussing more intently on influencing Clinton. In the past two weeks, in the wake of Warren’s forceful opposition, Clinton has backed away from a major trade agreement with Asian countries that, as Secretary of State, she had helped to negotiate. But, as Warren knows, Clinton can be an inconsistent ally. Her challenge over the next year and a half is to make sure that Hillary Clinton’s embrace of Warrenism is a lasting one.
On a shelf in her Boston office, Warren keeps a glass bowl of large rocks, a gift from her advisers during the 2012 Senate campaign, when she would often say to them, “I want to throw rocks.” When I visited her in Washington in late February, though, she was in a theatrical mood, reprising a scene from the early nineteen-seventies, when she was struggling to balance the strains of new motherhood, a failing marriage, and law school. Splayed out on a chair, she demonstrated how she drove her Volkswagen Beetle with one hand, reaching with the other into the back seat to keep the baby awake.
“No, no, no!” she yelled. “Wake up, baby, wake up, wake up! Just a little bit longer! Just a little bit longer! Do we remember the sunshine song?” She began to sing “You Are My Sunshine.” At the time, Warren said, she couldn’t get her homework finished unless her daughter napped at home; that meant keeping the baby awake on the drive back from the babysitter after class. “I learned to shift through the steering wheel, so as not to let go of that baby,” Warren said. Once, she crashed the car. “I rolled right into someone while doing that. Caved in the whole front end of that VW Beetle.”
Warren’s attempts at drama can feel forced. In her memoir, she frequently recalls times when she was “stunned” or “furious,” or when she “clenched” her teeth at the “vile” actions of the big banks. Her more compelling moments, captured on video, feature her passionately defending the role of government or pummelling committee witnesses—government regulators or bankers who have made the mistake of arguing a point with Warren, a former high-school debate champion. She has cultivated a public image as a fierce and uncompromising fighter, although her critics in business and politics sometimes use other words.
“I think that she would do better if she were less angry and demonized less,” Warren Buffett, the C.E.O. and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, recently complained on CNBC. Several commentators denounced Buffett, an ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton, as sexist, but one of Warren’s close advisers told me that her aides acknowledge the criticism. “I would modify her vitriol, because I think it gratuitously creates enemies,” the adviser said. “There is a grain of truth in what Buffett said.”
Warren is driven in part by an awareness of the obstacles that she had to overcome to achieve professional success. She grew up in Oklahoma City in the nineteen-fifties, the youngest of four and the only girl. “All I ever wanted to do was be a teacher,” she said. “It must have been miserable to be one of my dolls, because I used to line them up and teach school.” In her 2014 memoir, “A Fighting Chance,” she describes herself in high school as “tall,” “self-conscious,” and cursed with crooked teeth. Her mother told her to get married early, but she secretly sent away for college applications and, on the strength of her debate-team skills, won a full scholarship to George Washington University, in D.C. After two years, she dropped out of college and, at nineteen, married Jim Warren, whom she had dated in high school.
Warren soon realized that she had made a terrible mistake. “It was all over at that point, statistically,” she said. “You get married at nineteen and drop out of college, that’s pretty much it for most girls, especially back in the late sixties.” Still, she finished college and went to law school, at Rutgers, but her husband wanted her to stay home, while she insisted on going to work as a lawyer. “I tried,” she told me. “I tried so hard.” The couple, who had two children, divorced in 1980. (Jim Warren died in 2003, of lung cancer.)
In 1983, after finishing law school, and teaching law at the University of Houston, she took a position at the University of Texas Law School, in Austin, where she offered to lecture on bankruptcy law. She knew little about the subject, apart from her experiences of financial insecurity growing up. By the time Warren was born, the family’s finances were deteriorating. Her father, who served as a flight instructor in the Second World War, had sought a job flying but was passed over because of his age. He had lost all his money starting a car dealership, and then he was injured in a car crash.
“It was a life lived just at the edge of economic survival,” Warren said. “When I got sick, my mother would lean down, put her hand against my forehead, and then step back and do the calculation: how sick I seemed to be versus how big was the outstanding bill with Dr. Buffington.”
Eventually, her father found a job selling carpeting, and the family bought a station wagon and moved to a bigger house in Oklahoma City. Then her father suffered a heart attack. “It all just came undone in the blink of an eye,” Warren said. Her mother took a minimum-wage job at Sears to support the family.
At the University of Texas, Warren joined with two other professors to study what kind of people declare bankruptcy. At the time, the common view of most legal scholars and many politicians was that the bankruptcy laws were being abused by people cheating the system. Warren initially thought the same. “I’d gone into this research to prove that those people who filed for bankruptcy were different from us,” she said. “We’d had hard times, but we’d never filed for bankruptcy.” Jay Westbrook, one of Warren’s collaborators, who still teaches at the University of Texas Law School, told me, “We had a picture in our mind of sort of shiftless people who weren’t very careful with their money.”
Warren and her colleagues travelled to courthouses around the country and gathered data on hundreds of bankruptcy cases. There were no electronic records, so they flew from city to city with a portable Xerox machine that they called R2-D2. In academic legal circles, theoretical work was a surer path to a tenured position than empirical field research, but Warren and her colleagues stayed with it for almost a decade. One of the first cases she reviewed involved a middle-class couple who committed suicide before they could appear at their court hearing. “I looked at that and I thought, Yeah, I know people who would make that choice,” she said.
The data revealed that, by the early nineteen-eighties, a growing number of middle-class Americans were resorting to bankruptcy, and that most debtors were homeowners. “I will never forget the day that we did that data run,” Westbrook said. “We couldn’t believe it. We checked the computer three times.” Debtors were not irresponsible slackers but families hit with the sudden loss of a job, a divorce, or a bad car accident, which depleted their savings and pushed them into financial ruin. Bankruptcies were going up because of mounting economic stress on the middle class.
In 1987, Warren moved on to a job at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, teaching contract law and bankruptcy; in 1995, she went to Harvard. “She broke the news about what the actual practices and effects of the bankruptcy law were,” Martha Minow, the dean of Harvard Law School, told me. “That put her on the map and made a lot of people interested.”
Warren said that her early research has informed everything she’s studied since. She noted that by 1975 productivity and median wages, which until then had risen together, had started to decouple: the former continued to rise while the latter remained flat. Meanwhile, bankruptcy filings soared, regardless of how the economy was doing. “A problem that looks real but small and at the margins in the nineteen-eighties has moved to the center by the nineties,” Warren said, “and by the two-thousands it’s starting to hollow out America’s middle class.”
Warren tells her life story as a series of confrontations. Early on, she fought to escape her bad marriage and pursue a professional career; later, she fought against an élitist legal academy that looked down on her credentials and her research interests. In the late eightes and early nineties, at the University of Pennsylvania, she mostly avoided the debates over faculty diversity that were then seizing the campus. She was a registered Republican, and “was not viewed as a champion of women or minorities,” the Boston Globe noted, in 2012. “Silent on the race and gender wars that divided campuses in the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, she was never a liberal crusader.” Warren told me that she was immersed in her scholarship and wary of political fights outside her areas of expertise.
In 1994, Congress created a commission to make policy recommendations on how to reform the bankruptcy laws. Mike Synar, Bill Clinton’s first appointee to run the commission, recruited Warren to serve as the top policy adviser. Conservative and pro-lender members of the panel argued that the laws were too easy on debtors and encouraged reckless behavior, a position shared by the banks. The pro-consumer side, arguing for more lenient terms for Americans who go broke, often had a one-vote majority on the panel. Many of the big issues were decided by a vote of five to four. “This was the first time that I’m aware of that Elizabeth was exposed to and part of the crucible of politics,” a member of the panel said. By the end of her work on the commission, in 1997, Warren was a Democrat.
Congress mostly ignored the group’s work and adopted the industry-friendly bill, which many Democratic legislators, along with some of Bill Clinton’s senior advisers, favored. Warren went to see Gene Sperling, Clinton’s top economic aide in the White House, who opposed the legislation. She showed him a stream of hard data and offered talking points about how the legislation would hurt families in economic distress, but the situation looked hopeless. By 1999, while Clinton was recovering from the Lewinsky scandal of his second term, the bill had gained support in a Republican Congress. In addition, the Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, was from South Dakota, the heart of the credit-card industry, and he strongly supported the bill.
“It was tough to know what to do, as we were facing veto-proof majorities in both Houses,” Sperling told me. “Warren really did have an impact. She had amassed data to show that a lot of the rise in bankruptcies was due not to deadbeats but to medical debt and women hurt by divorce. Her facts helped buck up both Clintons to keep fighting for a better bill and gave those of us in the trenches good ammo and amendment strategies.” The White House slowed the legislation’s progress through Congress, and when it finally did pass, in 2000, Clinton, in one of his last acts as President, refused to sign it, effectively vetoing it. A White House aide later told Warren that, two days after her meeting with the First Lady, the White House economic team flipped its position “so fast that you could see skid marks in the hallways of the White House.”
The following year, Bill Clinton was replaced by George W. Bush. A new version of the bill was introduced. In Warren’s 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap,” she describes what happened next:
This time freshman Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the bill. Had the bill been transformed to get rid of all those awful provisions that had so concerned First Lady Hillary Clinton? No. The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not. As First Lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that the bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs. Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions. As New York’s newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn’t coming from families in financial trouble. Senator Clinton received $140,000 in campaign contributions from banking industry executives in a single year, making her one of the top two recipients in the Senate. Big banks were now part of Senator Clinton’s constituency. She wanted their support, and they wanted hers—including a vote in favor of “that awful bill.”
In 2005, a decade after Warren began her crusade against the bill, the legislation was signed into law by Bush. “We held them off for ten years, and that’s about thirteen or fourteen million families that made it through the system,” Warren told me. The delay, she added, proved that Wall Street was not as powerful in Washington as it had imagined. “The big banks thought they’d just roll in and pick up a few percentage points’ increase in their bottom line, because they could squeeze families a little harder when they were right on the edge and they could get just a few more dollars. They thought they had it made.”
Warren’s book became a surprise hit among Democratic policymakers. During the 2004 Democratic Presidential primaries, John Edwards called Warren to discuss it, and John Kerry mentioned it in a speech, declaring it “one of the best books that actually describes the transformation that has taken place in America.” It also earned the admiration of Dr. Phil, the TV psychologist, who invited Warren to appear on his show to talk about how families could remain financially stable in a world of predatory lending. Warren offered some unremarkable advice about the dangers of taking out a second mortgage to pay off other debts, but it altered the course of her career. The show had reached six million viewers, and she later wrote, “I might have done more good than in an entire year as a professor.”
When I called Dr. Phil, whose full name is Phillip McGraw, he said that he and Warren have remained friends over the years. “I was really intrigued by that book,” he said. “But I didn’t think it was particularly written for the general populace.” He told me that after the show he said to Warren that her book was “too technically intense and it’s not reader-friendly.” He encouraged her to write and speak to a much larger audience.
One of Warren’s lesser-known skills is an ability to build unlikely alliances. For years, she has worked closely with Camden Fine, the head of the Independent Community Bankers of America, who is considered by some to be one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington. In the financial world, community bankers see themselves as representatives of Main Street America, and they are often at odds with the financial behemoths on Wall Street. On a recent Friday, Fine, who is from Jefferson City, Missouri, greeted me in his office, on L Street, wearing pleated khakis and a striped button-down shirt. He radiates the image of the kind of small-town bank president who might have given your grandfather a loan on little more than a handshake. The walls and shelves of his office are filled with St. Louis Cardinals paraphernalia and Civil War artifacts, next to thank-you notes from Barney Frank and other politicians.
Fine represents some sixty-five hundred small banks across the country. Frank told me, “It’s the smaller businesses that have natural grassroots networks: Realtors, mortgage brokers, auto dealers, community banks. They’re in everybody’s district and they tend to have a very extroverted corporate culture: ‘Hi, how are ya, can I sell ya a car?’ Extremely good on TV.”
Community banks, which typically are local and often have less than a billion dollars in assets, are good at getting what they want out of Congress, but they are also considered more consumer-friendly than large financial conglomerates, such as Citigroup or Bank of America. In June of 2009, Elizabeth Warren went to visit Fine. For the four years since losing the bankruptcy fight, she had continued to teach and write at Harvard, but she remained politically active. In the months before the 2007-08 financial crisis, she became increasingly vocal about Wall Street’s mortgage-lending practices and wrote an article in a new policy journal, Democracy, that warned of the dangers of subprime-mortgage lending. The title of the article, “Unsafe at Any Rate,” echoed Ralph Nader’s 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” about the dangers of the unregulated automobile industry. Warren called for the creation of a new government agency that would do for financial products what the Consumer Product Safety Commission, created in 1972 by Richard Nixon, had done for toys, appliances, and other items.
“It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house,” she wrote. “But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street.”
Warren did not predict the subsequent financial meltdown in all its particulars, but her warning about the dangers of unregulated lending was prescient. “It was like watching a train wreck and standing on the side,” she told me. “You were screaming at people to stop doing this: ‘Wait, slow down, there’s gonna be a crash here.’ But nobody could make their voice heard on this.” She places much of the blame on the Federal Reserve, which had the regulatory tools to address the housing bubble: “Alan Greenspan”—the former Federal Reserve chairman—“inflated the bubble, and he did it either knowingly or with reckless abandon.”
In late 2008, after the crash, Harry Reid, the Democratic leader of the Senate, called Warren in Cambridge and asked her to serve on a new Congressional Oversight Panel, which was charged with monitoring how the federal government was spending the seven hundred billion dollars that was being used to bail out the financial sector. Jim Manley, Reid’s spokesman at the time, said, “Reid had heard her speak, and like everyone else was impressed by her ability to break complex issues down into sound bites that people can understand.” Reid told me, “She’d done a lot of writing on poor people. Nobody knew who she was, but she was great. Everybody liked her.” Warren temporarily gave up her teaching duties and moved to Washington.
Reid’s decision was not greeted warmly by the new Obama Administration. Treasury Secretary Geithner resented Warren’s use of the panel to question his policies in the middle of the crisis, and Warren complained that he denied many of her requests for information. “There was this feeling that Elizabeth Warren was pretty sophisticated,” a former Obama official said. “And when we’re getting hit everywhere she should be a little more sympathetic. She was somebody who was supposed to be on your side, and she carried more weight against you because she was a Democrat and was well regarded on these issues.”
Warren told me, “We were there to do oversight, and it made no difference to me whether there was a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. Our only consideration should be the American people, not whose feelings in government might get hurt or whose political careers might be advanced.” Warren said her work on the panel studying Treasury’s practices taught her that Obama’s economic advisers were even more beholden to the banks than she had understood. “The Treasury Department believed in saving those at the top, and didn’t worry much about the rest of America,” she said.
Warren was well known in liberal policy circles, but Geithner had never heard of her until she became his overseer and summoned him to testify. He felt that she was much better at complaining about what she was against than at articulating what she was for. In his recent memoir, “Stress Test,” Geithner calls Warren “one of our most ardent and eloquent liberal critics” but chastises her for not offering him more specific policy suggestions during the financial crisis.
Warren quickly realized that, although she could hold hearings and write reports, her panel had no more authority than her old blue-ribbon bankruptcy commission. Those writing the new rules for financial regulation had the real power. Warren thought she had a chance to get a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into the emerging law, so she stopped excoriating Geithner, and met with Fine, the bank lobbyist. She knew that public opposition to the protection bureau on his part could kill it.
“The Wall Street crowd constantly tries to use my members almost like human shields to try to get their stuff through, because they know that Congress likes smaller banks,” Fine told me. Warren took the same approach. She doubted that she could persuade Fine to support the agency, but, if the community banks simply remained neutral, that would be a victory. “We had not totally developed our position yet,” Fine said. “But we were very, very skeptical and were making noise that we were going to oppose the creation of that agency.”
Fine viewed Warren as a left-wing activist, hostile to the interests of his member banks, most of which were run by Republicans. “In the financial industry, Professor Warren was regarded as a little loopy, way out there on the fringe, and was not taken all that seriously,” he said. “So I told my assistant, I’ll spend thirty minutes with this loopy woman and then come get me and just make an excuse that I’ve got a call or something.”
Instead, Fine and Warren spoke for two hours. Warren played on Fine’s fears of the Wall Street banks, explaining that under current law small community banks were subject to more intense regulatory scrutiny than the large financial institutions. She argued that even if Fine and his members hated the idea of any additional regulation, at least her agency would make the mega-banks face the same kinds of review. “You need to give this agency a chance,” Warren told him.
Fine got up from the table where we were sitting and retrieved a document from his desk drawer. “I debated about showing this to a reporter, but it’s historic,” he told me. It was an e-mail he’d sent to the members of his executive committee the day after his meeting with Warren. At the top of the memo, in bold caps, it said:
DESTROY BEFORE READING. CONFIDENTIAL IN THE EXTREME. DO NOT FORWARD OR DISCUSS OUTSIDE THIS GROUP. LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. PLEASE DO NOT EVEN SHARE THIS WITHIN YOUR ORGANIZATIONS. THIS IS SENSITIVE MATERIAL AND ANY LEAK WHATSOEVER COULD CAUSE ICBA DAMAGE.
The e-mail recapped Fine’s meeting with Warren and laid out his group’s political strategy for the coming fight over Dodd-Frank, the bill that was to overhaul regulation of the financial industry. Warren “bluntly told us that she was meeting with I. C. B. A. instead of A. B. A.”—the American Bankers Association, which is dominated by the large Wall Street firms—“because she feels strongly that our understanding and support of her recommendation to create the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency is vital to its success,” Fine wrote. “She said that she wants community banks to get behind it. Her argument is that the big banks can afford to absorb continued and increasing regulatory burden, but that smaller banks cannot; and that if we don’t do something about the burden the big banks will crush us.”
Fine argued that Warren’s vision for the agency would not be so bad for community banks, but he did worry that her approach was too theoretical. “Dr. Warren is an academic, and thinks like an academic,” he wrote. “She has taught contract law,” and she “has never been out of academia. While I found her arguments compelling, they were terribly naïve. That said, if we are clever, I believe we can work with her and perhaps shape an agency that has little impact on community banks but a huge impact on the unregulated part of the financial-services industry.”
He said that, even if his group decided to publicly oppose the agency, it needed to work with Warren to shape the legislation. “Over all, it was a very good and enlightening meeting,” he concluded. “We might be able to turn lemons into lemonade yet.” Fine persuaded his trade group to remain neutral about Warren’s agency.
Warren effectively co-opted Fine and his members as allies against Wall Street. As the Dodd-Frank bill made its way through Congress, in 2010, Fine’s willingness to tolerate it was crucial. With Warren’s blessing, Barney Frank, who sponsored the bill in the House, negotiated a deal with Fine that allowed community banks to be examined by their current regulators rather than by Warren’s new agency. “They were the ones with the clout, and that’s why I had to make a deal with Cam,” Frank told me. Warren signed off on it. “She was willing to do what she had to do as long as it didn’t give away substance,” Frank said. “Every time we came to one of those things where, to save the great bulk of the bill, we had to make some kind of concession, she understood it and was very helpful in selling it.”
Geithner, long pilloried as doing the bidding of bankers, couldn’t resist pointing out the irony of Warren and Frank’s accommodation with Fine. “The smaller community banks, with members in every congressional district, got themselves largely carved out of the new consumer agency’s direct supervision, despite our resistance,” he wrote in his memoir. But, in exchange for the concession, Fine promised Frank that he wouldn’t oppose the agency, a position that Frank told me secured the support of many wavering centrist Democrats and helped insure the bill’s passage.
On July 21, 2010, Obama signed the new law in a ceremony in Washington. Valerie Jarrett, his longtime adviser, oversaw the seating chart for the event, and she instructed her staff to place Warren in the front row, between former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and the chairman, Ben Bernanke. Warren had accomplished something extraordinarily rare for an academic: she had turned a policy-journal idea for a new government agency into the real thing. Now she wanted to run it.
Many liberals were pressing Obama to nominate Warren to head the new agency, and fifty-seven representatives and eleven senators sent him a letter endorsing the idea. The White House did not appreciate the pressure. “I was pushing hard for her, and Obama got annoyed with me,” Frank said.
Soon after the bill signing, Warren and Jarrett met in Jarrett’s office, in the West Wing. At the meeting, Jarrett asked Warren, “Can you be confirmed?”
Warren had cultivated Jarrett as an ally, much as she had Camden Fine. The two women met soon after Warren first arrived in Washington, in early 2009, and they regularly dined together and talked about policy. In the early days, the Obama Administration was dominated by male economic advisers whom many critics on the left considered too sympathetic to the large banks. Warren helped Jarrett serve as a counterweight to Larry Summers, who was Obama’s top economic adviser and a White House rival for turf and power in the first two years of Obama’s Presidency. A former White House official said, “With the economic team, Valerie found it necessary to carry other voices into the White House herself. An added factor was that Elizabeth Warren is a strong woman and she and Valerie saw each other as kindred spirits.”
Jarrett helped persuade Obama to champion Warren’s new agency, but she was skeptical about Warren’s political usefulness. Warren suggested a compromise: let her spend the next year setting up the new agency, and then the President could decide whether he wanted to nominate her as its first official director. Jarrett agreed. Geithner opposed the idea, but Jarrett’s opinion prevailed with Obama, and Warren officially went to work under Geithner at Treasury to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Geithner writes that he was in favor of having Warren set up the agency, but Warren insisted to me that he opposed her. “It was a big struggle to get me in there to set it up,” she said.
The Administration’s enthusiasm for Warren continued to diminish. The Democrats lost the House to the Republicans in the 2010 midterms, and the Administration was looking for areas of compromise, not confrontation. Warren “has an oversized personality and at Treasury she ruffled a few feathers when she came on board,” a former senior White House official said.
The former White House official said, “I think in Valerie’s mind it wasn’t about Elizabeth Warren. It was about the President—where he wanted to go and what he wanted to get done. She respects people who are on the team, and that’s part of being on the team: you respect the President’s choice and you don’t try to jam him into making a decision. The Warren-for-C.F.P.B. boomlet began to look a lot more like it was about Warren than about President Obama and the goals of the Administration. And once that happens you lose Valerie.”
Fine, who saw the drama unfold, said of Warren and Jarrett, “She and Valerie had a love-hate relationship. In Valerie Jarrett’s mind, she is and always will be the queen bee. And she doesn’t want anybody else to become another force within the Administration.” Warren was diplomatic. “Valerie was enormously helpful when we were trying to get the consumer agency passed into law,” she told me. “Valerie is a friend.” When I asked if the relationship soured, she said, “I don’t think so. Valerie’s always been supportive.” In June, 2011, Obama asked Warren to come to the White House, and he informed her that she wasn’t getting the job. Fine blamed Geithner and pressure from Wall Street for the Administration’s decision. “Geithner despised her, and he’s the one who torpedoed her nomination,” Fine said. “He knew that she was a thorn in the side of his buddies up on Wall Street.” That probably overstates Geithner’s opposition. His legislative aides, who were in charge of Treasury’s relations with Congress, told him that the Senate Democratic leadership believed that Warren couldn’t win a confirmation fight, but Geithner left the decision up to Obama.
“Of course I was disappointed,” Warren told me. “I loved that work and I loved that agency.” The Warren adviser said that Warren was devastated after the meeting with Obama. “She wanted that job. She begged for it. She told the President, she told Valerie, she told them fifty times over. It was her baby. It was like taking away her child. It’s a very powerful agency, and it was her dream.”
The former senior White House official, who was involved in the decision, defended it on political grounds. “If she could have been confirmed, the President would have gone forward,” he said. “It became apparent that there was just no way the Republicans were going to do this.” He added, “She didn’t totally agree with that. She wanted to make this a fight.” In July of 2013, the Senate approved Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general and state treasurer, as the new bureau’s director.
Shortly before Warren left Washington and moved back to Massachusetts, she met again with the President. “You are the very best we have,” Obama told her. “I only wish I spoke as well as you.” On her last day at the agency, the Warren adviser said, “she walked out quietly, in tears, and that was it.”
In late March, Warren stood before a crowd of small-business owners and government bureaucrats in the ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel in the Boston suburb of Framingham. She was hosting the annual “matchmaker” meeting of a program that she created to help Massachusetts businesses win more government contracts. A few days earlier, in an editorial, the Boston Globe wrote, “Democrats would be making a big mistake if they let Hillary Clinton coast to the Presidential nomination without real opposition, and, as a national leader, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren can make sure that doesn’t happen.” But few people encountering Warren for the first time at that event would have left the room taken with the idea that she was a natural candidate for President. Warren told the crowd that, when she spent her year in Washington building the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she was frustrated that the same big companies got all the contracts. “This is all about business matchmaking,” she declared, pumping her arm. “Get out there and make some matches!”
Five minutes later, she stepped off the stage and hurried to a waiting car in front of the hotel. A few Boston reporters, eager for a comment from her about the Globe editorial, chased her out the door. Warren, who is well known in Washington for dodging the press when convenient—“She’s been known to pull out the old cell phone and pretend to be talking,” Jim Manley, Harry Reid’s former spokesman, said—sped off as reporters shouted at her. One shook her head and sighed, “I can’t believe this woman. She never answers a single question.”
Warren learned to be a highly disciplined politician during her 2012 Senate campaign. When Obama refused to nominate her to head the new consumer agency, his longtime adviser Pete Rouse told her that she should run for the Senate. Harry Reid also encouraged her. “Republicans were afraid of her,” he told me. “So what did they do? They said they would block her nomination. And thank goodness they did. Because after that I worked with Elizabeth and others to see if she would run against Scott Brown, who I thought was one of the worst senators in the history of my being around here. I mean, what a phony. In 2011, we worked hard to get her to run.”
Warren was skeptical. She wasn’t from Massachusetts and had never run for office; in January of 2010, Brown had become a hero on the right when, in a surprise victory, he was elected to finish the term of Ted Kennedy, who died in 2009. But Rouse argued that in a Presidential election year Warren would benefit from a surge of pro-Obama Democrats who hadn’t voted in the 2010 special election. More important, her reputation as the liberal conscience of the Obama Administration had created a national fund-raising network for her. She raised forty-two million dollars, becoming one of the best-funded Senate candidates in history. More than half of the money came through her Web site and more than seventy per cent from outside Massachusetts.
But for much of the campaign Warren was down in the polls, struggling to defend previous claims of Cherokee ancestry, and she was forced to run a TV spot about the controversy. “As a kid, I never asked my mom for documentation when she talked about our Native American heritage,” she said in the ad. “What kid would? But I knew my father’s family didn’t like that she was part Cherokee and part Delaware, so my parents had to elope.” Brown suggested that she had used the claim as an affirmative-action tool to advance through the academic ranks at Penn and Harvard. Conservatives spoke of “Fauxcahontas.”
The affirmative-action claim turned out to be meritless. “It never came up here in the appointments process,” Minow, the Harvard Law School dean, told me. “I was on the faculty when she was hired. They had no idea. Nobody did. It was a nonissue. Somebody checked a box at some point to report to the federal government or whatever. But it’s nothing that the faculty ever discussed—ever.”
Warren spoke at the Democratic Convention that September, before Bill Clinton, who delivered a memorable defense of Obama’s record. Although Warren’s address will not go down in the pantheon of great Convention speeches, she broke through in the polls soon afterward—aided by some debate performances against Brown—and she won by almost eight points. Throughout her campaign, she said that she wouldn’t go to Washington to be a polite senator who got along with her colleagues but accomplished nothing.
In the Senate, Warren has struggled to live up to the promises of her campaign. It’s not entirely her fault. The Senate was designed to foster long careers, and she is one of a hundred members in a body that operates under arcane rules and is hobbled by a super-majority requirement. In 2013 and 2014, she was a member of the majority, which gave her more leverage, but now—as one of the least senior members of the minority party—she has limited power and influence. I asked her how she can make a difference when she serves in a branch of government that has come to be defined by the fact that it does so little.
“Let me describe it differently,” she said. “I’m actually quite optimistic. There are a lot of tools in the toolbox.” She added that there is plenty of existing law governing how big financial institutions deal with America’s families but that government agencies don’t often use it. “One of the things that I work on as a senator is how to get the agencies to do that. And, if we can, the aircraft carrier moves one degree. Maybe two. But add that up over time, and pretty soon we’ll hit fifteen degrees.”
She had just learned that the Department of Education would not renew a debt-collection contract for Navient, a student-loan company that she has frequently criticized. The company was alleged to have violated federal rules in the way it collected payments from young people. It often failed to disclose payment plans that were available to debtors, a practice that led to higher profits for Navient. “The world just shifted one degree,” Warren said. “It will affect, over time, millions of people if there’s better debt collection. That is, more people who can get into the right repayment program, who can continue to repay, more people who will get the debt forgiveness that’s available to them as a matter of law. This isn’t charity. This is what the law says.” She added, “The playing field just got one degree more level. And that is good.”
Sometimes Warren is compared to super-partisans like Ted Cruz, one of the most outspoken and conservative Republicans in the Senate. Her aides and some Democratic senators object to the analogy, seeing Cruz and his colleagues as undisciplined conservative activists who insert themselves into every public fight. “He’s a pain in the ass to his own Republicans,” Reid said. “She’s not.” Warren sees herself as more selective in her battles, which can be an asset. “The people who are the most effective senators are the people who, if I said their names, you could tell me two or three things they really care about,” former Senator Christopher Dodd said. I recently watched Warren speak at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Iran sanctions. During most hearing appearances, she launches into a soliloquy or berates a witness. She holds typed notes and can be seen nervously lip-synching as she prepares for her moment on camera.
But at the sanctions hearings Warren made a short opening statement saying she believed that negotiations with Iran are the best option to prevent war, then explained that she wanted to hear the witnesses to understand if any new sanctions would help or hurt that process. (She later voted against the sanctions plan, which was being led by hawkish Republicans.)
Warren’s two biggest confrontations have been over Obama nominees whom she saw as too oriented toward Wall Street. While she was setting up the new consumer agency, Warren learned how the decision-making process works for high-profile nominees, and she knew from her own experience that, if Congress creates enough of a problem for a nominee, Obama will abandon him or her. Warren’s advisers believe that Obama has a low tolerance for political pain. Critics accuse Warren of grandstanding, but her aides insist that she is simply trying to influence decision-making.
The first Obama nominee she helped scuttle was Larry Summers, whom Obama considered nominating as Fed chairman. She collaborated with her old friend Camden Fine. “She and I worked pretty closely together to torpedo Larry Summers,” Fine said, recalling a secret campaign they undertook. In the spring of 2013, Fine told the Administration that his organization was going to publicly oppose Summers as chairman. It would have been the first time in the group’s nearly hundred-year history that it took a position on a Fed chairman. Fine couldn’t believe that Obama was going to pass up the opportunity to nominate Janet Yellen, who would be the first female chair of the Fed. He e-mailed Warren with the question “Really?” Warren e-mailed back and said she felt the same way. “She was also communicating with the White House and telling them that she wasn’t happy,” he said.
That summer, Rouse called Warren and asked her to soften her rhetoric against Summers, promising her that Obama would consult with her before he made any decision. “She backed off a little bit,” the former senior White House official said. “Not in her opposition to Summers but in her public aggressiveness in opposing him.”
“She can be in your face on an issue,” Reid said, recounting some of the battles in which she opposed the Administration. “But you don’t realize it at the time. She is very, very strong in a unique way. Her No. 1 quality is that great smile she has. It’s true. She’s very disarming.”
Fine worked on moderate and conservative Senate Democrats, such as Jon Tester, of Montana, while Warren lobbied liberals. When enough of the senators came out publicly against Summers, Obama gave up. “Warren got a couple of the progressive senators to oppose Summers,” Fine said, “and then I got a couple of the conservative Democratic senators, including Tester, to come out.” Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, who led the effort in support of Yellen, told me, “Senator Tester’s public statement seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Late last year, Warren seized on a Treasury Department nominee named Antonio Weiss, a former managing director at Lazard, where he had worked on so-called inversions, the practice by which a U.S. company moves its headquarters to an overseas location in order to lower its tax exposure. (In 2005, Lazard moved its headquarters to Bermuda.) Although the Administration has publicly opposed inversions, Obama picked Weiss to be Under-Secretary for Domestic Finance, a top position at Treasury. Warren orchestrated a campaign against him. Outside liberal groups that had championed her during her Senate race started a petition against Weiss, while she used outlets like the Huffington Post to criticize him. Inside the Senate, she quietly lobbied the liberals again, and one by one they started to come out against him.
The former senior White House official said that he was “disappointed and surprised” by the opposition, because Warren began her public campaign just weeks after Democrats lost the Senate to the Republicans in the midterm elections. “The President had just gotten killed in the election, and this is one of his first appointments,” he said. “I don’t object to her opposing Antonio Weiss, but I would have liked to see her at least wait a little bit, give the President a little bit of space, maybe meet with the guy before she came out and attacked him and said he’s unqualified because he worked on Wall Street. But that’s consistent with her brand, and it worked for her.”
Camden Fine was skittish about taking a position on Weiss, but he eventually promised Warren, “If you go public, we’ll go public.” Weiss withdrew his name, and the Administration made him a Treasury adviser instead, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation.
One of Warren’s advisers believes that if she entered the race against Clinton she would be shredded by the Clinton political machine. Instead, the best way to pursue her agenda is to use the next year to pressure Clinton.
“I think she’s in a beautiful position right now,” the Warren adviser said, “because she can get Hillary to do whatever the hell she wants. Now the question is, will Hillary stick to it if she gets in? But at the moment Elizabeth can get her on record and hold her feet to the fire.”
Clinton’s advisers are respectful of Warren, but they privately argue that Clinton has a more sophisticated understanding of the economy, and that Warren places too much blame on Wall Street as the root of America’s economic problems. “The challenge of wage stagnation is that it’s happening in large swaths of the economy, many parts of which are relatively untouched by the influence of the banks,” a longtime Clinton adviser said. “There is a legitimate line of economic thought that countries without as large a financial sector as the U.S. have less inequality, but Goldman Sachs doesn’t really have much to do with the rise of Uber and TaskRabbit.”
Warren took exception to the Clinton camp’s critique. “I think it’s important to hold Wall Street accountable,” she told me. “Some of the biggest financial institutions in this country developed a business model around cheating American families, and they put out the riskiest possible products. They sold mortgages that were like grenades with the pins pulled out, and then they packaged up those risks and sold them to pension plans and municipal governments, groups that did not intend to buy high-risk financial products. That’s how Wall Street blew up the American economy. That’s a genuine threat, and that’s worth paying attention to.”
This isn’t the first time that a Democratic candidate has had to manage an emboldened left. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama pilloried free-trade agreements before becoming President, then shepherded such agreements through Congress. That’s the nature of Presidential campaigns. This month, Clinton’s aides are busy pointing out her liberal record, but in the general election next year, if Clinton is the Democratic nominee, they will be highlighting her centrism.
Harry Reid, a major Clinton supporter who said he was “happy” that Warren has decided not to run for President, told me that he ultimately sees Warren not as Clinton’s rival but as her emissary to the left. “Hillary Clinton will have her come where she’s needed,” he said. “No one is more forceful and more articulate on issues with the progressive community.”
Warren insists that she can have more influence as a senator than by running against Clinton in the primaries. “I think right now I’m using the best tools to make change,” she told me. When she got into politics, she said, “first, it was for my own family and my children, then a little bit bigger, for my brothers and to take care of my mom and dad, and then my students, and then my work about what’s happening to families just like mine all over this country. I’m still working on exactly the same things, and I’m working on the best possible way to make change.”
When I questioned her decision to skip the Presidential campaign, she snapped, “You think I’m not forcing a debate? Call me back in a year, and ask me what type of debate we’re having.”
Fine offered another explanation for her hesitation. “I’m not sure she thinks that she, personally, is ready to be the President of the United States,” he told me. I asked Warren if Fine was right. She was rushing to a meeting at the end of a busy day in the Senate. For the first time since I began speaking to her, four months ago, she seemed tongue-tied.
“Um,” she said, and then paused. “I’m doing the work I should be doing.”
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