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Meghan Daum
Getting Serious About Elizabeth Warren’s Electability
She’s cornpone and wonky and taught Sunday school. But these underrated human qualities may well lift her into the White House.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw Elizabeth Warren. It was in Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit, and the Era of Predatory Lenders, a 2006 documentary by James Scurlock that essentially predicted the soon-to-come financial crisis. In addition to devastating interviews with debt-ruined consumers, the film featured a number of well-known faces, including then–Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, Eliot Spitzer, and Robin Leach (of all people). But the breakout star of the film was Warren, a Harvard Law professor known at the time mostly for a few books about the shrinking middle class. Cambridge chic in a black turtleneck, tweed jacket, and no-nonsense pageboy haircut, Warren held forth animatedly about predatory lending practices and how borrowers in bankruptcy were actually credit card companies’ favorite customers. With her now-familiar speech inflection — call it a cross between exasperation and golly-gee bafflement — Warren was a little bit dorky. She was also totally captivating—by far the most memorable part of the film.
In 2009, the newly elected President Obama put Warren in charge of a startup agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a watchdog agency that Warren originally proposed in a 2007 article for the left-leaning quarterly Democracy Journal. As such (and because this was a time when the president of the United States read Democracy Journal and obscure agency heads appeared on television talk shows), Warren was a guest on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I recognized her immediately. “It’s that woman from Maxed Out!” I shouted.
I was watching the show that night with my mother. I remember saying something like, “Pay attention. This woman is going to be the next big thing.” But the interview was a little strange. Warren was stilted and unable to remember the name of the very initiative she was trying to explain. She would later write in her memoir that she was so nervous before the show that she threw up repeatedly, but at the time it seemed like she was being coy. In the end, Stewart gave her…
