Elizabeth Warren Lost Her Dream Job but Gained a Path to 2020 [View all]

[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