by Rebecca Johnson
<...>
Typically, an appointment to an oversight committee means sitting behind a microphone, asking polite questions, then generating a brick of a report that nobody reads. Warren did not play by those rules. Instead of making nice, she challenged the Secretary of the Treasury to explain exactly where the $700 billion in bailout money went and why the U.S. government had to pay 100 cents on the dollar for all those bad AIG investments. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, those testy exchanges landed on the Internet, where every American pissed off over the bailout could delight in watching Timothy Geithner squirm.
<...>
Her own aides worried that her aggressive questioning might have meant career suicide in Washington, but Warren hit a chord with the public precisely because she wasn’t concerned with getting ahead. “Elizabeth has never been a calculating person,” says her husband, fellow Harvard Law professor Bruce Mann. “She came to Washington late in life from the very secure position of being tenured at Harvard. She’s not running for anything. I do feel sorry about the videos of her questioning Geithner, but she was just doing her job. She doesn’t personalize things. After it’s over, she’s friendly and she means it.”
Warren herself finds it hard to believe that people are so taken aback by the way she speaks. Sitting in her sparsely decorated new office, where the tags are still on the Aeron chairs, she rejects the idea that her mode of discourse is anything special. “I am glad to be useful, but I don’t think I have anything that remarkable to say. Maybe it’s just the nakedness that comes from clarity that is frightening, but if you are going to do work in the public interest”—she pauses as she searches for the right words. “Just the idea that you talk as long as you can and say as little as possible. . . .” She makes a dismissive gesture, then brings the conversation to the heart of her work, which is about the struggling middle class.
“I think it’s about having a moral compass,” she concludes. “I get how deeply wrong so much of what has happened is. I don’t do library research; I talk to families who have worked hard and just slammed into a wall. Sometimes it’s from bad decisions, but sometimes it’s from medical problems, job losses, death. Bankruptcy is about trying to scramble your way back. Maybe you won’t ride so high in the water, but you can stop those 25 calls from collection agencies every night.”
more
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
