When Elizabeth Warren was asked at one of her invitation-only, listening-tour house parties in Andover whether she was ready for the onslaught of scrutiny a potential US Senate candidacy will bring her, she got very quiet, according to some who were there.
After a brief pause, she launched into a passionate – even emotional – soliloquy about the struggles and challenges facing middle class Americans who she said have to live from paycheck to paycheck, if they’re lucky to have one. If middle class Americans can keep moving forward, she said, by gosh she could, too.
“Everyone got quiet. It was an extremely poignant moment, a moment that struck me,” said Lynne Lupien, a blogger for the liberal LeftinLowell.com website who attended the event. “Not only does she have the right answer, she feels it.”
It is that connection to the middle class that defines Warren’s writings, her research, and will likely be the core of her candidacy when she formally announces. It influences where she stands on taxes, health care, government regulation – always in favor of policies that give a boost to those struggling and not to the wealthy. Her views echo, in many ways, those of then-candidate, if not president, Barack Obama, who she has served as an economic advisor.
“How can a big company like General Electric pay no taxes while you and I pay taxes on every dollar we earn?” she asked approving union members at this week’s Greater Boston Labor Council’s annual Labor Day Breakfast.
While the mood and tenor in Washington have made Warren’s type of candidacy an outlier, in Massachusetts she’s swinging to hit the sweet spot on the traditional Democratic platforms and programs eschewed by the rise of the Tea Party.
Warren has never run for, let alone held, elected office. She and her second husband, Harvard professor Bruce Mann who is treasurer of her exploratory committee, have reliably voted Democrat in every state and national primary since moving to Cambridge from Pennsylvania in 1995. Neither Warren nor Mann has missed a municipal, state, or federal election since registering as Democrats.
She is now the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard and lives in a $1.7 million Cambridge home, but Warren continually points out she was brought up “on the ragged edge of the middle class,” not unlike the man she seeks to replace, Sen. Scott Brown.
Much of Warren’s writings and stances come from her family background and upbringing in Oklahoma, where her father had a heart attack when she was 12. His illness forced Warren, her mother, and other family members to go to work to support the household while her father recuperated.
Warren’s focus for more than 15 years has been on the financial plight of the middle class, especially in bankruptcy and especially women. She has authored several studies on the effects of what she terms “medical bankruptcy,” those cases where injury or illness can wreak havoc on a family’s finances.
A 2007 research paper she co-authored and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2009 found that “62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92 percent of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5,000, or 10 percent of pretax family income.” The paper also found that bankruptcies caused by excessive medical bills rose nearly 50 percent since 2001. Some of the information for the paper came from a book she published in 2000 entitled “The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt” as well as articles in other health-related publications in 2005 and 2006 and a similar study she did in 2005 at Harvard.
“Many in Congress have a response to the problem of the growing number of medical bankruptcies: make it harder for families to file bankruptcy regardless of the reason for their financial troubles,” Warren wrote in 2006 in the Washington Post touting her Harvard research paper on bankruptcy. “Bankruptcy legislation — widely known as the credit industry wish list — has been introduced yet again to increase costs and decrease protection for every family that turns to the bankruptcy system for help. With the dramatic rise in medical bankruptcies now documented, this tired approach would be no different than a congressional demand to close hospitals in response to a flu epidemic. Making bankruptcy harder puts the fallout from a broken health care system back on families, leaving them with no escape.”
Warren’s attacks on the credit card companies and her battles to get the controversial Consumer Advisory Board up and running stand in stark contrast to Brown’s support of banks and Wall Street, even though Brown was one of four Republicans who voted for the Dodd-Frank Act which established the board. She regularly refers to bank examiners as “money cops.” According to Open Secrets, which monitors campaign contributions, the financial sector is Brown’s largest contributor among industries.
Despite her lack of public service, Warren has a documented stance on a number of policy issues, having written hundreds of articles, books and blog posts as well as the scores of research papers on bankruptcy and the national financial system. She’s also no deer in the headlights and is a polished public presence after testifying before Congress and appearances on national television ranging from PBS to “The Daily Show.”
Warren’s research and study of the nation’s bankruptcy laws and trends seeps in to many of her other positions. Warren, who has written at least four books about bankruptcy and its effect on the middle class, is all in with both the Massachusetts and federal health care reforms, calling “comprehensive health care reform” essential in easing the bankruptcy epidemic she sees in the nation’s courts. Brown campaigned on his promise to be “the 41st vote” to defeat the federal law and remains steadfast in supporting its repeal.
Her writings are also a family affair, authoring two books with her daughter, financial consultant Amelia Warren Tyagi. One of their books, entitled “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke,” makes the argument that working mothers have actually made families more vulnerable to financial distress because of added costs for daycare and schools. In the book, Warren and Tyagi call for subsidized daycare for middle class families, school vouchers and, Warren’s recurring theme, further bank regulations.
Married at 19, a mother at 22, divorced and reentering the workplace after law school, Warren, who has kept her first husband’s name even after her divorce, has focused some of her research specifically on the financial problems she says are unique to women. As far back as 1999, she began writing and researching the number of women forced into bankruptcy court. When Congress was considering a bill in 2002 that would make it harder for individuals to declare bankruptcy, she urged lawmakers to kill the bill because she said it was “a quiet attack on women” by credit card companies and banks. She argued the bill disproportionately affected women and would make it harder for them to collect child support if they were to divorce. Her words could hurt her among men, who are Brown’s strongest constituency.
“Women are more likely than men to seek bankruptcy in the aftermath of a divorce or a medical problem, though both men and women cite job problems as the biggest difficulty,” she wrote in a 2002 op-ed in the New York Times. “At the same time, 200,000 women will find themselves in bankruptcy court not as debtors but as creditors — trying to collect alimony or child support from their ex-husbands. . . Yet in the pending legislation, credit-card companies and car lenders have devised a number of ways to ensure that more of their debt, including interest and penalties, is made similarly sacrosanct and payable forever. This puts divorced women in direct competition with credit-card companies for some of an ex-husband’s limited income.”
When she talks about the pressures of working families, she relates how, at 24 and reentering the work force with two children in diapers, she found there was a “price differential for [parents of] non-potty trained and potty trained” toddlers.
“Thank God for M&M’s” she said in her keynote speech at the Labor Day breakfast to the knowing nodding of nearly every woman in the room.
Homepage photo by Frank Curran.
