[ On reddit someone said they’d heard a lot about why not to vote for Brown but were looking for a positive reason to vote for Warren. I suspect this commenter may have been a troll trying to create the impression that voters haven’t much positive pro-Warren campaign advertising, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt and an honest answer. Here it is, edited a little bit. ]
Here’s why you should elect Elizabeth Warren to the US Senate:
She’s very obviously in politics not to make money or amass power or build an ego, but to get things done that she feels very strongly will make people’s lives better. She’s clearly been dedicated to making people’s lives better for many years, and worked hard on it, and accomplished a lot, without being in office or even considering running for office, and only this time decided to run for office because she realized it was the best next step.
Warren used to hold politically conservative views, until she studied bankruptcy and the financial conditions of average people. She not only collected a lot of extremely valuable data over many years, some of which has become the basis for a lot of policy and analysis by government and academics, but she also realigned her political views on issues based on data. In other words, she went looking for data, analyzed, saw what it said about the state of the world, and derived political views from that. That’s unfortunately rare among top political leaders today, but it’s what we need.
Her years of collecting data on bankruptcy and personal finance also mean she has learned a lot about how economic issues play out for a wide variety of real people, in real life, and how government policies affect us all over time. Next, she was given the task of watchdog over the banks’ use of TARP, and while she wasn’t given much actual power in that job, she became famous for her questioning of financial company officers at hearings, where she proved that she understood finance and banking in depth, and did her research meticulously.
Next, Warren launched a grassroots campaign to create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at the federal level because she passionately believed that it was necessary to advocate for and protect regular people from trickery and fraud by large financial companies, something she saw before the financial crisis made it obvious to most people. When she started here campaign it seemed impossible it would succeed, yet she somehow managed to put together an organization, and a movement, and a lobbying campaign, that outmaneuvered the finance industry and got it created. She did that when she wasn’t even in elected office or in a government post or anything of the sort! Imagine what she can do as a Senator.
After this success, Warren was appointed to create that agency, and spent a year actually putting together a brand new, significant federal agency from scratch. She did an excellent job and that shows amazing administrative, political, and people skills. Only a year later, the CFPB has already demonstrated that it is doing its job, including winning massive refunds from two major credit card companies to their customers for deceptive marketing.
Elizabeth Warren is likely to be one of the best and most effective US Senators this country has ever seen in its history. She may yet outshine Ted Kennedy.
