Elizabeth Warren – Heiress Apparent to Obama’s Throne

Eliazbeth Warren has many aliases. She’s called the Sheriff of Wall Street, the Joan of Arc for the middle class and the left’s messiah. The Harvard professor has been campaigning to become Massachusetts’ next senator in 2012 and current Senator Scott Brown. The election is generating little interest since the seat is almost certain to go to the Democrat. It is the Elizabeth Warren phenomenon that is so fascinating. A 62-year-old attorney and grandmother of three has become the nation’s new ‘It Girl.’ The Occupy Wall Street movement considers her its ideological mother, but she only lays claim to its intellectual foundation. In the New York Times, Rebecca Traister has cryptically dubbed her “the next ‘one.’” Finally, there’s someone who can restore hope for all those so bitterly disappointed by Obama.

The financial crisis made Warren a star. The cult surrounding her persona goes back to when she chaired the Senate committee overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program fund. In 2008, she was charged with supervising the $700 billion rescue package meant to rehabilitate the banks. In no time at all, she transformed the initially chaotic body into a dreaded committee with herself as the chief prosecutor. Unruffled, direct but never aggressive, she revealed those she questioned to the world with all their blemishes. In front of the camera, she bombarded Democrats as well as Republicans with questions that every taxpayer in the nation wanted the answers to. Her questioning of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has become legendary. She asked Geithner if he knew what became of the public money that had been given to insurance giant AIG. Geithner stuttered, averted his eyes and searched for excuses. Warren dug relentlessly further until Geithner almost had a nervous breakdown. An icon had been born.

In recent years, she became a popular commentator, a welcome change from the shrill Palins and Bachmanns of the country. With the authority of a patient teacher, she taught the world’s students what the titans of Wall Street had wrought and what happens when the government fails to control them. The bankruptcy law expert examined what had driven the American middle class into bankruptcy for decades. Her conclusion: a dysfunctional system that favored banks over human beings.

It was Warren who convinced Obama that the government needed a robust consumer protection agency — her gift to the American middle class. The agency is supposed to protect consumers from financial products that put fine print in their contracts that cause interest rates to double if customers don’t pay on time or allow payments to skyrocket if they miss a payment. The banks went to the barricades to prevent the agency from coming into being, but in vain. The agency opened this summer, but Obama balked at nominating Warren as its director. Republicans considered Warren a socialist who wants to wage class warfare, and Obama was too fearful of their opposition to risk such a move. But Warren is also not without enemies among those Democrats who think the non-partisan professor is too direct, too unforgiving and too populist to be politically branded.