The Candidates: Elizabeth Warren – The New York Times

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In Part 3 of our series on pivotal moments in the lives of the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, we spoke with Elizabeth Warren about how she came to be known as the blow-it-up candidate. With help from Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial columnist at The Times and founder of DealBook; Harry Reid, a former Senate majority leader; and David Axelrod, a former Obama adviser, we explore Ms. Warren’s rise to prominence as an advocate for overhauling the financial system — and why those beliefs can help us understand her run for president now.

Four key moments from our interview with the senator

A conversion

Elizabeth Warren was studying the right thing at the right time. A professor in bankruptcy law at Harvard, Ms. Warren was one of the few Americans for whom the financial crisis of 2008 offered a career break.

Before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and global financial markets entered free-fall, Ms. Warren studied more mundane and insidious examples of financial ruin — a bankruptcy crisis in the middle class.

“When I first started the research,” she said, “I thought, well, my family was in a lot of financial trouble, but we never declared bankruptcy. So I was willing initially to kind of accept this notion that the people who end up bankrupt, the people who end up broke, did something wrong.”

Ms. Warren got on a plane and crisscrossed the country, looking for evidence that the defendants in local bankruptcy courts were “profligates.” Instead, she said, she encountered the devastation of a country without safety nets — one where people were ruined by predatory fine print, trapped in debt after just one job loss or hospital visit.

“These are people who look like my neighbors. They look like folks in my family,” she said. “That was the part that hit me the hardest.”

Soon, she changed her party identification from Republican to Democrat.

“And boy, that’s when I got in the fight.”

The call that made her career

Ms. Warren made the financial crisis her classroom — both for herself and her students.

“I’m going in literally every morning and teaching my bankruptcy class, and I end up not teaching the day’s lessons — I end up teaching all of the things that were in the headlines the day before,” she said. Soon, her lessons spilled outside of working hours.

One Thursday night, late in the fall of 2008, Ms. Warren invited her students to her home for dinner.

“And the guy is delivering the barbecue. Our golden retriever is doing big circles around me, you know, is in heaven smelling this barbecue,” she said. “And the phone rings and it’s this soft-spoken man who says, ‘This is Harry Reid.’ But I said, ‘Who?’ And he said, ‘Harry Reid. I’m the majority leader in the United States Senate.’”

Mr. Reid had put Ms. Warren on a short list of candidates to lead “a task force to take a look at what was going on with the financial meltdown,” he said.

After meeting with the majority leader, Ms. Warren said yes.

Making enemies on the Congressional Oversight Panel

Within months, Ms. Warren was charged with overseeing new, arcane regulations, “arresting the free-fall and trying to save the economy.” Her independent task force of five was writing extensive monthly reports and holding public hearings which probed the genesis of the crash — and outlined what they felt needed to change on Wall Street.

Following the paper trail of a $700 billion bailout made Ms. Warren enemies in both the Obama administration and inside the banks deemed “too big to fail.”

“They saw her as a relentless opponent of the financial industry at a time that they were trying to prop the financial industry up,” David Axelrod, former senior adviser to Barack Obama, said.

Still, Ms. Warren says she wasn’t in Washington to make friends. Instead, she tried to find new ways to reach the general public to explain the import of her committee’s work. By making digital videos and appearing on television, Ms. Warren was able to test what messages resonated, uncovering what stories made the crisis comprehensible.

On “The Daily Show,” she finally cracked the code.

A second chance

Ms. Warren knew what she was getting into when she agreed to be interviewed by Jon Stewart.

Speaking of the night, she said, “I’ve been watching [the show] for a long time and frankly taken real delight in watching Jon Stewart skewer one guest after another. And all of a sudden it’s like realizing, ‘Whoa! I may be the turkey at this Thanksgiving dinner.’”

Sitting in a “tiny, tiny” green room surrounded by snacks, Ms. Warren’s anxiety took over at the sound of the crowd.

“And I thought, what am I doing here? This is, this is a really bad idea. And I went in the bathroom and threw up.”

Washing up, she wondered if anyone would notice she had gotten sick. Soon, she was sitting across from Mr. Stewart — eyes wide and mind blank as she was peppered with questions.

“I choked. I choked. I choked big time.”

She forgot the name of a key Treasury Department program, which Mr. Stewart made light of.

“I thought well, that’s it! I’ll call Leader Reid tomorrow, Harry Reid, the head of the Senate, and resign politely for having so humiliated myself and the Congressional Oversight Panel and I will resign and he can put someone in who at least can remember the names,” she said.

Then, at the end of the segment, Mr. Stewart surprised both his staff and Ms. Warren when he said she would be back after the break. A show producer came over and asked her what she was had been trying to say. This time, she said, she managed to deliver her response in a single sentence.

Back from the break, Ms. Warren was transformed.

“So this is really the moment for Elizabeth Warren when she learns how to tell a story with a narrative arc about big, complicated ideas,” Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial columnist for The Times, said. “And she figures out how to make those stories resonate with a large audience.”

It was also, he said, the moment when “the financial world looks up and says, ‘Who is that? And where did she come from?’”

Andrew Ross Sorkin contributed reporting.

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