Felix - Elizabeth Warren

Copyright 2018 by Antonia Felix

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To Stanford

Im never tired of despair and desperation,

And I wont be quiet. I keep crying out that the house

Is being robbed. I want even the thieves to know.

R OBERT B LY , T HE N IGHT THE C ITIES B URNED

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie.

P AULO F REIRE

On the main streets of the Oklahoma towns of Elizabeth Warrens forebears, wooden buildings with tall, false fronts tried to make the structures appear larger than they actually were. All it took was a side-angled view to discover the deception. Similarly, through one particular decade of her career as a legal scholar, Warren gradually noticed the emptiness in the promise that the markets of American capitalism held potential prosperity for everyone. Behind that claim stood nothing but a tall tale: capitalisms promise of benefits for all did not hold true on the Main Streets where 99 percent of the population lived. Warren took a pivot in her life to tell that story and transform it into policy and reform.

My interest in writing about Elizabeth began in 2012 when I watched her televised speech at the Democratic National Convention. As the warm-up to Bill Clinton, she stepped onto the blue stage to thundering applause and chants of Warren! Warren! The law professor, for the first time, was running for an elective office, the U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts. She had staked her claim as a populist, similarly white-knuckled about standing up to the big banks as her favorite president, trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt. That night, she tapped into the postfinancial crisis angst with her trademark mantra that rang true for the millions whod lost their pensions and homes and jobs to a Wall Street free-for-all and felt no one had been held accountable for it: People feel like the system is rigged against them. And heres the painful parttheyre right.

After Warren won her Senate election that year, I started a file that stayed on the corner of my desk for the next few years, crammed with articles and magazines that featured her photo on the cover. By the spring of 2017, she had become a brand-name populist who many had thought would run for president in 2016 and were now eyeing for 2020. My folder had also turned into a bona fide research project, and I was delighted to have a contract to write this book.

I looked forward to meeting people across the country who could give their unique angle of Warrens life as it had crossed theirs. The public sees Elizabeth in front of the camera on cable news, late-night talk shows, and in Senate committee hearings, and in each of those settings she has a message to convey or information to glean and little time to do it. The people I interviewed who encountered Elizabeth in various passages of her life have a longer view and described her as energetic, open, warm, genuine, unaffected, and kind. Her leadership style, according to those she mentored into law careers or who worked on her staff, seemed to fit the profile of the female leaderrelational, collaborative, and encouraging.

In her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead , Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg invited women to reach for more success by acting more like men, leaning in to grab opportunities and negotiate for better salaries. At the same time, however, acting nice and concerned about others would increase a womans chances, according to one scholar she mentioned, which put the onus on women to throttle back their authentic selves to serve the biased expectations of men (and some women). That game-playing perpetuates rather than challenges the gender bias embedded in the workplace and in society in general, and Sandberg acknowledged this paradox. Elizabeth Warren is not one to reengineer her focused communication style or tenaciousness in order to adhere to expectations about what is appropriate for fighting for an issue.

Since discovering her mission to put her expertise about the financial hardships of the middle class into practice, Warren has never lost the sense of urgency that first gripped her around the issue. She knew that about herself when she entered the Senate in 2013. I came knowing that large parts of what I understood about how the Senate worked would never work for me, she told Time magazine in 2015. I would not have that kind of time, but more importantly, Americas middle class did not have that kind of time. For Elizabeth Warren, the clock is always ticking.

Among the surprises that unfolded in Warrens story was the impact her bankruptcy research had on her evolution as a scholar and, as I frame it, a public intellectual who feels compelled to bring her work to the public square. Writing for general audiences instead of limiting her work to law journals was another form of teaching, which had been her goal since grade school. The more her research taught her about people whose financial peril brought them to the bankruptcy courts, the more she peeled away her own assumptions about Americas most indebted and down-and-out. Her work changed her to the point that she shifted from a Republican to a card-carrying Democrat.

Another transformational piece of her story goes back to coming of age in the early and mid-1960s. Elizabeth was too young to be influenced and empowered by the feminism that was only beginning to sprout. Instead, like so many of her generation, she struggled with the clash between the Betty Crocker model of ideal female wholeness and her inner spark to get out in the world and try something. I found that struggle just as telling about who Elizabeth Warren is as the tale of her rise from a dusty, financially strapped Oklahoma childhood to academic and political prominence. She had to find her own way through those critical years when her heart was pulled in two directions with equal, searing force. There were no easy answers or foolproof road maps, only choices to make and the tenacity to work through them.