ShareThisNORMAN, Okla. - At ease amid noisy young relatives and family photos in her brother's home here, Elizabeth Warren doesn't seem like a person at the center of a fierce political battle that stretches from Wall Street to the White House.
But Warren, the leading candidate to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she helped create, has been the target of invective from financial insiders who fear her ideas.
Anton Schutz, president of Mendon Capital Advisers Corp., a financial management firm in Rochester, N.Y., last week was quoted in a Reuters story: "I get disgusted every time I hear her speak." Warren, 61, is baffled by the invective.
"I have never run into anything like what has happened the past few weeks," said Warren, a Harvard Law School professor, author and chair of the congressional oversight panel reviewing implementation of the government's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Warren believes American consumers have been victimized by predatory practices. Her goal, she said, is what it has been throughout the 20 years that she's been researching financial data.
"I want to make it so regular families can read a credit card agreement in four or five minutes and fully understand what the terms are. No tricks. No traps. No things that you don't figure out" ... until after (it) bites you and they charge you the $39 and raise your interest rate to 29 percent," she said.
Financial insiders point to Warren's lack of industry experience as evidence that she doesn't grasp the complexities of their business or the impact regulatory changes would have.
"I do understand," she said. "It's that we disagree. There are some things that I don't think are all right, and people who are making money off of it think it's just fine."
Last week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs labeled Warren "a terrific candidate" to head the bureau."
Warren attended grade school in Norman, then skipped sixth grade when her family moved to Oklahoma City. She graduated from high school at 16 as a debate champ, earning a college scholarship.
She became a teacher to brain-injured children in a New Jersey school but felt stifled by administrative constraints. Her former high school debate classmates urged her to attend law school and, after running a private law practice, she returned to teaching -- at law schools.
(She taught at Rutgers and the universities of Houston, Michigan, Texas and Pennsylvania before moving to Harvard.) She taught "all the money courses -- commercial law, contract law, bankruptcy law," she said. "That's where my research was, and that's when I started doing research on families that went broke."
Before Warren was born, her parents lost most of their savings when a business partner in a planned car dealership absconded with their money.
Her father, a flight instructor during World War II, worked as a traveling salesman in Oklahoma City, then as a maintenance worker. The working-class family couldn't afford to send Warren to kindergarten, which at the time was offered only at private schools.
"Sure it was partly about my family, but it was about millions of other families," Warren said of her research. "That was the work I started doing. That's how I ended up where I am today."
Warren has written numerous books, including "The Fragile Middle Class: Americans In Debt" (2000) and the bestselling "All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan" (2005). Her work has showed that most American consumer bankruptcies are not filed by financial freeloaders, but by people whose finances have unraveled due to divorce, death or health crises.
Warren's public profile grew through her consumer advocacy. She unsuccessfully tried to derail the 2005 bankruptcy reform pushed by the financial industry.
In the wake of the financial crisis, Warren was appointed to head the congressional oversight panel reviewing TARP implementation.
Her Oklahoma upbringing is evident in the blunt, basic questions she asks during hearings, and she recognizes her style differs from the typical Washington way.
"These people aren't used to simple questions. They don't expect to hear them and they somehow, when you do (ask them), act like you're not half-bright or you're somehow asking something nasty," she said.
Asked whether TARP has been a successful use of taxpayer dollars, Warren said: "It's like having a garage sale ... and the good stuff is resold at a profit so it looks like you're making good money. Yeah, but how about the stuff that's still left behind? That's where the problem is -- AIG, GMAC, GM, Chrysler, Citi. How fully the American taxpayer gets paid back, we don't have enough information to tell for sure."
Warren is no fan of business as usual in Washington.
"What's begun to hit me is that people have enormous power and yet nobody's ever responsible," she said. "... I hope that the way this new agency works out is not just that it has the tools to get things done -- it's accountable for making change."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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