Book Review 

A Fighting Chance, by Elizabeth Warren 

Elizabeth Warren is the Senator of Massachusetts, and something of a political rock star in America. YouTube videos where she tears into hapless Wall Street bankers has attracted several millions of views and when she recently appeared on The Daily Show, John Stewart asked her what if felt like to have her own wing of the Democratic Party. This Teddy Roosevelt-like progressive zeal naturally means that Warren has her fair share of enemies as well as a given place in the media spotlight.   

Mrs. Warren´s story seems inextricably tied with the concept that her country has always held most dear, that of the American dream. Born in Oklahoma in 1949 to working class parents, Warren´s lofty aspirations of going to college and becoming a teacher seemed far out of reach for her family´s modest means. Coming from a country where all education, including university, is free, I was already misty-eyed and rooting for Warren at this point. Her mother, as she explains, was neither cruel nor did she doubt her daughter´s potential, she merely thought that the life of a housewife would be a much safer bet. Warren did marry and have children at an early age, but when her father gave her a fire-extinguisher for Christmas after she had set the kitchen on fire while trying to make toast, she decided to give her lifelong dream another go. The married suburban bliss of the nuclear family´s housewife, that Don Draper and his cohorts from Madison Avenue where peddling in their glossy 1960s ads, clearly wasn´t meant for her.       

Warren graduated law school and eventually ended up as a professor with a burning passion to teach. In 1995 she found herself working on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. This was where her interest in politics was born when she fought a long drawn out rearguard action to try to prevent tougher bankruptcy laws that would be a severe blow to those who needed a fresh start in life. At first, Warren writes, she viewed these people as irresponsible, their undignified shuffle to the bankruptcy court being due to a carelessness with money and a lack of responsibility. Many of those she met, however, were just regular people who had fallen on tough times. A job lost or a sick family member could mean that someone who had worked hard and played by the rules their whole life was suddenly standing on the precipice of a vast economic abyss. Their only hope to escape the steadily growing tide of bills they couldn´t possibly afford to pay, was to take the plunge and wipe their slates clean. As Warren painfully admits, those who fought the good fight were not nearly as well funded as their adversaries, and the pressure from a Republican held congress to sign the new bankruptcy legislation was mounting steadily. Bill Clinton vetoed the bill in the final days of his presidency, but a newly inaugurated W signed it into law with the stroke of a pen shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, thanks to Warren and her colleagues dogged determination, they managed to hold off the poisonous bill long enough to save thousands of families. Despite their bitter sweet loss, Warren didn´t lose faith. Assuming the mantle of David fighting against a well-heeled Goliath had only whetted her appetite for public service. I suspect that her go to rallying cry of “The system is rigged in favor of those with money and power”, originated from this desperate yet noble struggle.

A few years after her doomed fight for bankruptcy legislation, events conspired to place Warren in the spotlight once more. This time she would come face to face with Timothy Geithner, whose biography, Stress Test, was the first book I reviewed on this blog. After the financial meltdown of 2007, senate majority leader Harry Reid placed her on the TARP oversight committee, her task being to oversee the implementation of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. I remember from reading Stress Test how Geithner felt that Warren was out of her depth in this role, and that her senate hearings were geared more towards YouTube-sensationalism than serious inquiry. The YouTube bit may not have been entirely false, but Geithner never seems to have gotten on very well with Warren, nor did he seem to take her very seriously. In his mind she was more or less the kind of swivel-eyed lunatic who tells the mob with pitchforks to burn down the witch’s hut.

The humble and unassuming Geithner who featured in Stress Test is, however, suspiciously absent from Warren´s account of the TARP-proceedings. She tells us a gem of an anecdote about how Geithner invited her to a lunch meeting at a nearby restaurant in the capitol. They were both seated in the back of Geithner’s colossal SUV, with a couple of burly Secret Service men by the wheel. Since they were going at a breakneck pace, Warren had wisely fastened her seatbelt, and advised the Secretary of the Treasury to do the same. When he responded smugly that both his bodyguards carried firearms and were trained to use them, Warren sensibly pointed out that wouldn´t help him if the SUV got into an accident and rolled over. Geithner, Warren notes dryly, didn´t fasten his seatbelt until they had already eaten lunch and were on their way back.

Although the two of them didn´t see eye to eye on most things, there was something they both agreed on, that the Dodd-Frank legislation passed after the crash was not enough to reign in the excesses of the big banks. They may very well be right in their jointly held assumption, but all was not doom and gloom. One has to assume she liked to make toasts when the oversight panel took their afternoon break, since her old misfortune with the toaster that caught fire during her housewife days came back with a vengeance.  In the years that followed those perilous times when you could smoke in your car and drink scotch and soda in your office, someone founded a government agency responsible for making sure that toasters didn´t catch fire. Why was it, Warren asked herself, that same protection didn´t apply to mortgages and other financial products? Surely you should be able to expect that, as a consumer, the financial products you buy doesn´t have a ticking time bomb buried among all the fine print? The same people who had lobbied for the cruel bankruptcy bill were obviously opposed to this as well, but luckily this time she had President Obama and several other influential people on her side. Initially Warren was poised to lead this agency, but powerful voices opposed her. This turned out to be a good thing, because if they hadn´t you wouldn´t be reading this review. 

The bankers, thinking they had finally gotten rid of Warren, praised their luck and continued business as usual. Their capitalist nirvana of long days spent fundraising, golfing, laughing out loud for no apparent reason and gradually picking away at Dodd-Frank, however, turned out to be short lived.

A long time ago (2013), in a land far away (Massachusetts), Republican senator Scott Brown sat on the senate seat that the late Ted Kennedy had occupied for forty seven years. Kennedy, a renowned liberal lion, had been one of Warren´s few allies when she fought the bankruptcy bill. The seat had been narrowly lost to the Democrats and the people one Wall Street who Warren fought on a daily basis now had a stern ally in Scott Brown. Brown was a former National Guard colonel who had previously served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and won Cosmopolitan Magazine´s America’s sexiest man competition in 1982. He was the kind of square jawed jock who drives a Ford Mustang convertible and dates the prom queen in every High School film that´s ever been made. Even the Massachusetts firefighters association, who later endorsed Warren in the election, admitted that they would rather sit down and have a beer with Scott Brown than with Mrs. Warren. Holding one´s liquor, however, is not the only skill a Senator has to master, even though it is certainly more impressive than balancing the budget.

The long and tough senatorial campaign of Warren vs Brown garnered national attention and Scott Brown´s affluent supporters poured untold millions of dollars into his campaign. The mood turned ugly quite a few times and every aspect of Warren´s life was examined by her opponents in search of something they could smear her with. Super Pacs led by Karl Rove, a longtime conservative strategist, attacked her Native American ancestry as well as her policies, which they tried to paint as a greatest hits compilation of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin. In the end Warren prevailed, Massachusetts was in Democratic hands once more and her fiery rhetoric would continue to be viewed by millions of people on YouTube.

Warren´s autobiography is a thrilling read. Small wonder, since her life could more or less be made into a rags-to-riches Hollywood film without any airbrushing. Just like you would expect from a book in this genre, A Fighting Chance is written in clear, simple language with an emphasis on ease of reading instead of Shakespearian flourish. The plot may be on the serious side, but it´s filled with enough anecdotes and wry humor to liven things up after all the misery of inhuman bankruptcy laws and financial meltdown. Ultimately, it tells the tale that people have always found fascinating, that of an underdog and an unlikely hero, and it does it remarkably well.