A darling of the left, Professor Elizabeth Warren was the subject of presidential talk long before she beat Sen. Scott Brown (R) of Massachusetts in 2012.
After she became Senator Warren, the drumbeat only got louder. Now, she is all but certain to leave the fans supporting the Ready for Warren draft movement disappointed. But like Biden and Kerry, she is another one who might be persuaded into the race if something happened to Clinton.
Warren would bring a long record of populist activism to the table. She conceptualized and promoted the idea for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects consumers from unfair lending practices. In the process, she became a liberal lightning rod, and thus unconfirmable in the Senate as the bureau’s first head – so Obama made her a special adviser to help set up the bureau.
She served in that post from September 2010 to August 2011, when she returned to her faculty job at Harvard Law School. Warren is an expert on bankruptcy law – and is a passionate defender of the lower and middle classes. She grew up in Oklahoma City, the daughter of a janitor.
During her Senate campaign, she raised a whopping $42 million – much of it from outside Massachusetts.
