Great read, lots lots more at the link. Too much to quote.
But the Clinton encounter Warren remembers most vividly was their first, 17 years ago, when Clinton clearly had all the leverage.
Today, in her airy, high-ceilinged Senate office, Warren recalls being an obscure Harvard Law School professor summoned to deliver a command performance to Clinton backstage at a Boston hotel after the first lady had finished a speech. To this day, she isn’t sure Clinton quite knew who she was; East Wing policy staff simply wanted her to explain a GOP-sponsored bankruptcy bill, then get out. Clinton greeted her briskly, then tucked into a hamburger and fries as Warren launched into a passionate presentation against the bill: Tell the president to veto the damn thing, she said; it was a travesty designed to squeeze “the last couple-tenths of a percent” profit out of hard-pressed women and children who had fallen on tough times as a result of divorce, financial ruin or medical catastrophe.
“I mean this in the nicest possible way: She didn’t know this stuff. … But [she was] one of the smartest people I ever sat down with,” recalls Warren, remembering Clinton peppering her with questions between bites—and pushing the plate to the middle of the table to offer fries. “We get all the way to the end—and I still remember this ... she stood up and said, “‘We need to stop that awful bill!’”
The first lady did, in fact, go back to persuade Bill Clinton to veto the bill, in Warren’s account: “The next thing that happens, there were skid marks in the hallways of the White House from advisers changing their positions after Mrs. Clinton got involved.”
But what happened later was even more telling—and set the stage for a complicated, tense and still-evolving relationship between the two strikingly dissimilar women atop the Democratic Party in 2015.
Three years after the hamburger summit, in 2001, Hillary Clinton, by then the junior senator from New York, had her own chance to weigh in on the bankruptcy bill. She voted in favor of a modified version (that provided limited protections for women and children) over the vehement objections of Warren and other consumer advocates. It passed, yet when Clinton was running for president in 2007 she glossed over that “yes” vote and claimed, during debates, that she “fought the banks” on bankruptcy reform. Warren has complained about it ever since, one of the reasons Bill Clinton refused to campaign for her during her 2012 Senate campaign. Another is Warren’s attacks on Clinton’s former Wall Street allies, a former Clinton aide tells us.
Some of Warren’s friends told us she would reconsider if Clinton were to exit the race unexpectedly. (“Opportunity knocks, and she runs towards it, obviously,” says Jody Freeman, a friend from Harvard, speaking more generally of Warren’s approach.) Run Warren Run, a group pressing her to run that is infused with $1.25 million from liberal groups MoveOn.org and Democracy for America, now has offices in New Hampshire and Iowa.
In an interview, Warren maintained, with a dismissive sweep of her hand before the question could even be posed, that the White House thing just isn’t going to happen. And she pushes back, hard, when we suggest that she is using her hard-won national platform merely to pull Clinton to the left in 2016. “You are framing it, in a sense, too narrowly,” she says. “No, the question for me is how can we change, how to make this country change, how to get this country back on a path where people can build real economic security.”
Many politicians come from humble beginnings. What makes Warren unique is how directly her academic and political careers have sprung from childhood setbacks and family anxieties.
In the 1960s, Warren’s father, Donald Herring, a salesman at a Montgomery Ward store in Oklahoma City, suffered a debilitating heart attack. Warren was 12 at the time, and over the next few years, the family flirted with financial collapse. Her father lost his new car, her mother took a job at Sears and Warren began busing tables in her aunt’s restaurant while in junior high. Even when Herring went back to work, they barely managed to scrape by as medical bills mounted. “It was a big damned deal,” she said.
Clinton, just two years older than Warren, has often talked about the constraints on ambitious women who came of age in the ’60s, but she was dating a future president in her early 20s, a time when Warren was struggling to escape the middle-American bouffant gulag. Warren dropped out of college at 19—abandoning a debating scholarship at George Washington University—to marry her high school sweetheart, had her first child at 21, worked awhile as a speech therapist, got a degree at a public law school in her late 20s, hung up a law office shingle outside her house at 30, divorced, remarried and launched a teaching career, all while raising two young kids.
If Kennedy was her patron on the inside, Jon Stewart was her angel on the outside, coaching her through stage fright during an appearance on his show in 2009 to explain the importance of holding the bailed-out banks accountable. In her 2014 memoir, Warren says she threw up repeatedly in a green room bathroom before taping, then stumbled on air, only to be saved by the sympathetic Daily Show host. Warren steadied herself, and was far more relaxed on subsequent appearances. By 2010, Stewart was kvelling. “I know your husband’s backstage, but I just want to make out with you,” he told her.
Using the platform Stewart provided, Warren pushed an idea she had first raised in a 2007 article: the creation of a consumer protection board, which she later argued should be inserted into the financial reform bill Democrats pushed after the financial crisis. It tapped the growing rage over the bailouts—and the Obama administration-approved bonuses to bailed-out firms—by proposing an agency that would investigate banking and credit card practices, payday lending and other financial activity prone to abusive practices.
Moreover, it appealed to Obama’s top political advisers, especially Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, who saw the political perils of the bailouts looming for the president in the 2012 reelection campaign.
Wall Street and the Republicans hated it—and Warren. But the board picked up an unexpected supporter in Warren’s longtime frenemy from Harvard, Larry Summers, who was by then Obama’s most influential economic policy adviser. Warren had long viewed Summers as an architect of deregulation and had criticized his role in eliminating the Glass-Steagall Act’s separation between vanilla commercial banking and risk-taking investment banking in the 1990s.
At a marathon dinner at the Bombay Club near the White House in April 2009, Summers and Warren argued over policy—but in the end he threw his support behind the board, which virtually ensured its creation. One exchange (recounted in Warren’s memoir) that stuck in Warren’s mind, however, was his advice—unheeded—on how to behave as a newly christened power player. “Outsiders can say whatever they want,” he counseled, “but insiders don’t criticize other insiders.”
