On Elizabeth Warren

Massachusetts Maverick

‘A Fighting Chance,’ by Elizabeth WarrenBy AMY CHOZICKAPRIL 24, 2014

A couple of months ago, on Connecticut Avenue not far from the White House, I passed a crowd of 20-somethings wearing distressed denim and hoodies. They looked more Williamsburg than Washington and carried placards that read: “I’m from the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party.”

I happened to be headed to a source lunch to discuss Hillary Rodham Clinton’s potential 2016 candidacy, and the activists seemed straight out of central casting, planted there by the same progressives who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and are determined to find a 2016 contender to run against Clinton.

Warren, the 64-year-old Massachusetts senator described by one reporter as “a strand of pearls short of looking like the head of the P.T.A.,” is not, however, out of central casting.

A professor who spent most of her career teaching law students about bankruptcy, Warren is an unlikely icon for the Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing set. She didn’t run for elected office until 2011; the following year, she defeated the Republican Scott Brown to capture the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy. By the time she was prodded into running, Warren had been turned off by Washington, and her favorite activities were walking Otis, her slobbery and obese golden retriever; knocking back fried clams and beer with her husband, the legal historian Bruce Mann; and visiting her three grandchildren in California. Or, at least, that’s the narrative she lays out in a relatable, folksy voice in “A Fighting Chance.”

Elizabeth Warren at Harvard, 2001. Credit David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images The book is a potent mix of memoir and policy that makes politics seem like a necessary evil, and yet it’s impossible to read Warren’s story without thinking about her meteoric rise in the Democratic Party and those Warren groupies on Connecticut Avenue. That makes the aw-shucks, I-just-stumbled-into-the-Senate anecdotes that propel her narrative feel inevitably like the savvy (critics would say self-­serving) story lines that would play so well at an Elks Club in Iowa.

Warren writes that before the 2012 campaign, the most fund-raising experience she had was a “ferocious effort” to help her daughter’s Brownie troop sell cookies. Her campaign went on to raise $42 million, setting a 2012 Senate fund-­raising record, mostly from small donations. Add lines like “America’s middle class is under attack,” “The game is deliberately rigged” and “Politics so often felt dirty to me,” and the book seems written by someone with bigger ambitions than taking the grandkids to Legoland.

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These are the flash points, after all, that have become central to the Democratic Party and a White House grappling with how to address income inequality. The ­anti-Wall Street sentiment for which Warren is the poster girl led to the Occupy Wall Street movement and helped elect Bill de Blasio as the mayor of New York. (Warren has said she will not run for president, and she doesn’t discuss the 2016 election in her book.)

Talking points aside, a politician’s personal story is a powerful currency, especially when it starts with a lower-middle-class childhood in Oklahoma City and features characters like wise old Aunt Bee and salt-of-the-earth Daddy, who lost his job selling carpeting at Montgomery Ward. (Warren writes about how “everyone on our mother’s side . . . talked openly about their Native American ancestry,” and she says she was “stunned” when Republicans called her a “Fauxcahontas”: “Knowing who you are is one thing, and proving who you are is another.”)
When recounting how her political career took off, Warren spends more time on the intricate ticktock behind the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau than on her personal life, perhaps because she didn’t have much of one in those years. But it’s the intimate moments in “A Fighting Chance” that make up its less wonky and infinitely more readable parts. We see Warren as a girl, watching her 50-year-old mother cry as she tried to zip up a too-tight black dress; she had an interview for a job answering phones at Sears, Roebuck to help keep the family from losing its small house in a good school district.

Refreshingly, Warren rarely dwells on her gender (though she does poke fun at an Obama adviser’s suggestion she be the C.F.P.B.’s “cheerleader”). But like many women of her generation, she felt stifled in the 1970s as a young wife and mother to two children, Amelia and Alex. It was in the kitchen one night, after she’d put both kids to bed, that Warren — called “Betsy” by friends and family — looked over at her first husband, Jim, smoking a cigarette as she cleaned up. She asked if he wanted a divorce. “No hesitation, just yes. He moved out the next weekend.”

Three decades later, Betsy was a Harvard law professor and talking with a political operative as she contemplated a run for the Senate. She began to tell him that her first husband had died in 2003. “Before I could take a breath and explain about Jim’s terrible illness, . . . about the blow to Amelia and Alex, about how he never had the chance to know his beautiful grandchildren — the research guy shouted ‘Great!’ ” In political terms, a deceased ex-husband is better than a living one.

That’s the sharp-elbowed world Warren says she never thought she’d be a part of. “I never expected to run for office — but then again, I never expected to do a lot of things in my life,” she writes. “I never expected to meet the president of the United States. I never expected to be a blonde.”

But a prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention (right before Bill Clinton) and a seat in the Senate don’t happen willy-nilly, and Warren is far from a passive observer. Before she ran for office, she had become a leading expert in debates about predatory lending practices and bankruptcy legislation, as well as a thorn in the financial industry’s side. The idea that some banks are too big to fail, Warren writes in “A Fighting Chance,” “allows the megabanks to operate like drunks on a wild weekend in Vegas.” Families who fall behind on their debts are usually “desperately ashamed of their situation,” and have been saddled with health care costs or tricked into taking out subprime mortgages with egregious terms hidden in the fine print.

That message first brought Warren national attention with her 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke,” written with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. In that book, they wrote about a meeting with Hillary Clinton in 1998 to discuss bankruptcy protections for struggling middle-class families. (Before Warren began her pitch the first lady “snapped her head sharply to the side and called to no one in particular, ‘Where’s lunch? I’m hungry.’ ”) The authors go on to criticize Clinton’s coziness to Wall Street as a New York senator. There’s hardly any mention of Clinton in “A Fighting Chance.”

Warren mostly avoids the overheated rhetoric associated with some well-heeled progressives; her vernacular is more Nick at Nite than The Nation. After Barney Frank said he would include the C.F.P.B. in the Dodd-Frank reform package, Warren thought, “Wowee-zowee! It was a cartwheel moment.” An invitation from the White House arrived while she was in Oklahoma, and she rushed to the local mall to buy the first department-store suit she could find. “Holy cow — the White House! A presidential announcement!” She nagged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to buckle his seatbelt, imitated the Three Stooges with Obama and Geithner before stepping into the Rose Garden, and vomited from nerves backstage at “The Daily Show.”

For all her humble goofiness, the title of this book reminds us that this is about Warren’s fight. She is still the fiery advocate who called for a bureau to protect consumers or, as a second choice, “no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.” And she lit up both political parties in 2011 when she said, at a campaign stop, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” Not even stories about rocking a grandbaby to sleep or baking Sunday-school treats could soften that.