The Daily - The Candidates: Elizabeth Warren

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

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 how that rise helps us understand her run for president now. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading:The New York Times Magazine spoke to Ms. Warren in June, discussing the double standards that can confront professional women — and female presidential candidates.Ms. Warren has lots of plans. Together, they would remake the economy.We asked 21 candidates the same 18 questions. Hear Ms. Warren’s answers.

My name is Jason Ross, and in the spring of 2009, I was a writer at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and we had a big problem because we had to make comedy about the financial crisis. And that was hard, much harder than writing jokes about something horrible like the Iraq War. Everybody understands war. Nobody understood the financial crisis. It didn't help that we couldn't even trust the experts because they're the ones who got us into this. In 2009, nobody had any credibility. The media didn't have credibility because they let it happen under their watch. Wall Street didn't have credibility. They created it. Washington was creating something called a

money bazooka, so they didn't have any credibility with us. So we were kind of in a bind with some of these guests because we didn't trust them 100%, but we also didn't have the expertise to challenge them with much credibility. So we had some limited options and it was always a lot of work. But on April 15th, 2009, we had a guest coming on who would really give us the goods. I thought, what am I doing here? This is a really bad idea. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Part three in our series on pivotal moments in the lives of the top four Democratic candidates for president. Today, Elizabeth Warren. It's Friday, December 13th. Good to see you. Senator. How are you doing, Michael? That's okay. Let me get around you.

There we go. We got it. Where do you want me? Right there. Yeah. There's your hot water. Got it. So thank you for making time for us. I'm delighted to be here. Let's just jump in. My colleague Andrew Ross Sorkin, who's a financial columnist at The Times, who's written a lot about your career, told me about what feels like a turning point moment for you back in April of 2009. So that's where I want to start this conversation. It's the height of the financial crisis, and you get a call from the daily show with john stewart what do you remember thinking when you got that call really i mean here i am doing this

really wonky work as the financial markets are in free fall The question every day is whether the banks can survive. Millions of families are facing foreclosure. People have lost their jobs. Pension funds have gone down. And I have this little panel, the Congressional Oversight Panel, that is supposed to bring some accountability to this system. And I'm fighting the Treasury Department every day, the Federal Reserve every day, and just trying to talk about what's happening. And frankly, since there's no official legal power for that little oversight panel, to try to get more people engaged so we can put some pressure on them to get some accountability in what's going on with taxpayer money and with these big banks and with the

bailout following the crash, this $700 billion that Congress had authorized. And when Jon Stewart called, I thought, wow, I could talk to a whole lot of people who otherwise might not be watching this and be able to talk about what's going on and start to put it in some context because it's not only, think about where it is at that moment. It's about the crash and arresting the free fall and trying to save the economy. But it's also about understanding what went wrong so we do the right thing next in terms of how we change the rules and regulations around Wall Street and financial matters. So you see this as a big opportunity to explain what is going on to people. That's my first response.

And then... And then? I actually show up in New York to do the Jon Stewart show. And I've been watching it 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. So, the closer I get to going on, the more anxious I get.

And they put you back in this little tiny, tiny green room, right, where they have some food out and some drinks out. And I sat there. You could hear kind of through the walls, they're warming up the crowd. And I thought, what am I doing here? This is a really bad idea. And I went in the bathroom and threw up. You threw up? Yep.

And I thought, I may look stupid. And more importantly, I may make the work look stupid. So once you kind of clean yourself off. And that's what I had to do. That's exactly right. I still remember standing over this tiny little sink and washing my mouth out, you know, with my hand and putting cold water all over my chin and looking up. Looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, you think anyone can tell you just threw up? So once you get out on the set, how does it go?

It's worse than I thought. My guest tonight, a professor of law at Harvard University. I'm standing behind like this big, heavy curtain, and then, pshooom! Please welcome to the show, Elizabeth Warren! Welcome! I end up out on stage, and all of it is new to me. Welcome to the show. Thank you.

You are the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel on this relief effort, the money that is being funneled to these companies. How much money has been sent to them and what have these companies done with it? Well, we think it's about $590 billion. And he just starts peppering me with questions. I mean, he is a smart and thoughtful man. Are you confident that the right thing to do was to hand over billions of dollars to these companies? Do you believe that this is going to work? Do you think this that this is going to work? Do you think this was the right thing to do?

Are we already behind the eight ball? You know, we started this process when Secretary Paulson basically said, here's $350 billion to the financial institutions. And he did it on... He's asking this, he's asking that. Was the money stolen? Is that why he didn't want any of it? Was it...

No, nothing is feeling coherent some of the money is now being committed to pip it are you about to curse Is that an acronym? Yeah. I'm not even going to try on this one. What does PIPID stand for? I don't remember. It's an investment thing. My heart rate slowed down, and 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. I've watched it. You did. You choked. Yeah, I choked. I choked. I choked big time. Oh, I remember. It's Public Private Investment Program. I'm sorry. It just took me a minute. Public Private Investment Program. P-Pip. P-Pip. P-Pip. So anyway, we finish up, and I'm ready to get out of this chair. Elizabeth Warren, we'll be right back. And the guy comes over to hustle me off.

Because you remember, Jon Stewart's interviews used to be one segment, and that was it. When the commercial comes, you're through with the guest. And he's looking at me, and he said, so what would you have said about this crisis? And I told him in one sentence. And he said, okay, stay. And... You were granted a television reprieve. Well, a reprieve or a second firing squad.

I mean, who knows? We're here with Elizabeth Warren. So... Why isn't the first thing we do is to say no one will be allowed to be too big to fail? Okay, so what you're asking is if we can get this bus pulled out of the ditch, the economy, what does the road look like going forward? Yes.

Because this really is the big question. I told him about what had gone wrong in America. Every 10 to 15 years, there's a financial panic in our history. You just look at it. And there's a big collapse, big trouble, people lose their farms, wiped out, until we hit the Great Depression. We come out of the Great Depression and you say, you know, we can do better than this. We don't have to go back to this kind of boom and bust cycle. We come out of the Great Depression with three regulations. We go 50 years without a financial panic, without a crisis. Then what happens is we say, regulation, ah, it's a pain,

it's expensive, we don't need it. So we start pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric. And what's the first thing we get? We get the S&L crisis. And what is our repeated response? We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric. So we have two choices. We're going to make a big decision probably over about the next six months. And the big decision we're going to make is it's going to go one way or the other. We're going to decide basically, hey, we don't need regulation, you know, it's fine. Boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and bust,

and good luck with your 401. Or alternatively, we're going to say, you know, we're going to put in some smart regulation that's going to adapt to the fact that we have new products. And what we're going to have going forward is we're going to have some stability and some real prosperity for ordinary folks. And that's socialism.

That, by the way, that is the first time in probably six months to a year that I felt better. Something, I don't know what it is that you just did right there, but for a second, that was like financial chicken soup for me. That was, thank you. That actually put things in a perspective that made a little bit of sense. And I really do appreciate that. And good luck with that. Andrew Ross-Sorgan, why is this the moment

that you wanted us to ask Elizabeth Warren about? 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. And she figures out how to make those stories resonate with a large audience. This is that skill that has really become almost her political brand and has brought her the followers and created this ascension of her role as one of the leading candidates in the presidential 2020 campaign. That episode of Jon Stewart was the first time I ever saw her do that. And really, I think the first time the public ever saw her do that. It was also the moment, as I'm covering the financial crisis in real time as a columnist for The New York Times, that the financial world

looks up and says, who is that? And where did she come from? I want to understand how you end up on that set. How do you become an authority on the U.S. financial system? Where does that interest really begin? So I grew up in a family that was hanging on to its place in the middle class by its fingernails. And I always wanted to be a teacher. Started out as a public school teacher. I taught special education. I ended up going to law school, practiced law for about 45 minutes, and then ended up right back in teaching. So I teach contract law, commercial law, corporate finance, partnership finance, bankruptcy law, debtor-creditor, law and economics. If it was about money, I was teaching it.

And the question that always was at the center of what I did is, what's happening to America's working families? Why is America's middle class being hollowed out? So piece at a time, what this pulls me into is first studying the families themselves, that they're going broke. Why were bankruptcy rates in the 80s going up and up and up? So during this period, personal bankruptcies are skyrocketing. People have taken on way too much debt. And in fact, individuals are going to personal bankruptcy

court and asking for the equivalent of loan forgiveness to get back to zero. And Elizabeth Warren is fascinated by this phenomenon and what's driving it and where it came from. And, you know, at this point, she's a registered Republican. I think so. At this time period, I've been registered an independent registered Republican. And so as she's going into this research project, she's making some assumptions that follow those politics. So when I first started the research, now this is before I quite had all the pieces, 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. They are the profligates. They were the ones who went to the mall and hooped it all off. And they tried to buy a house they couldn't possibly afford and four cars. And then it all came piling in on them. And they took the easy way out and went to bankruptcy. And so she gets on a plane and literally starts traveling the country and visiting bankruptcy courts. And I'm really thinking, yeah, I'm going to go check out these people who have carelessly run up debts. And, you know, now they're coming to the court to be able to wash away these debts in a very generous bankruptcy program. And I was in court, I remember this, in San Antonio, Texas. And a lot of courtrooms, they're quiet. They're often sort of dark. And up at the front

is a judge on a raised platform behind a heavy, imposing desk. And I'm sitting in the back, and I watch the people who come in, and they're they're dressed for church. You can just tell. They've got on their finest. They're men and women who are clearly anxious. Most of the women are clutching tissues. Most people look just one step away from tears. And as I sat there, I started to think, wait, these are people who look like my neighbors. They look like folks in my family. And they are so humiliated to be there. That was the part that hit me the hardest,

that it's easy for an economist to say, oh, bankruptcy's a great deal. Yeah, right? You stand up and try declaring publicly. That you're out of money. You're a loser. Not just out of money. You're in a hole so deep that dead flat broke looks good to you. So you're realizing that your assumptions about who is in trouble financially, who goes bankrupt.

They're just wrong. They're wrong. Many of them are solidly middle class people who got good educations, bought homes, had families, and then a serious medical problem, a job loss, a divorce or death in the family, and they were over a financial cliff. And actually, you know something that made me angry about it? That story of who those people are is one that was actively being pushed through the media, actively being pushed by these bankers who put out, oh, bought and paid for study to say people enrich themselves through bankruptcy as often as the law allows. No.

The committee will come to order. So as this is happening, Washington is considering reforming the personal bankruptcy process. This year, one in every 100 households will declare bankruptcy. In other words, individuals are falling deeper and deeper into debt with less and less capacity to get themselves out. And she's watching this all play out, and she's seeing the credit card companies and the big banks lobbying not to make it easier for individuals to get out of debt, but actually to make it harder.

The federal bankruptcy law is probably too liberal. I mean, it's grossly too liberal. And if you want to know how liberal it is, compare it with all the bankruptcy laws of Western Europe, and you'll see that ours is a kindergarten system compared to a very severe system over there. And so between her research and watching what's happening in D.C.

I think it's too easy to go bankrupt and it's too tempting. She decides it's not only not a personal responsibility story, it's actually something much more systemic. It's a system that she sees as being designed to prey on people who rely on credit cards. It's the insurance companies that don't cover what you think they cover. It's the mortgage agreements with intentionally confusing fine print. It's the whole system set up in a way that if you're not rich, you're extremely vulnerable. And on top of all of that, it's a system that she sees as being put in place and paid for by the big banks themselves. It's so wrong.

And there's just not a bunch of anybody out there to fight for these families. What happens to Elizabeth Warren in this moment is pretty remarkable. She changes her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat. She changes stripes midlife. And boy, that's when I got in a fight. We'll be right back. To kill a mockingbird is unmissable and unforgettable, raves Rolling Stone. Five stars. The New York Times declared it a critic's pick, saying,

This is a mockingbird for our moment. A beautiful, elegiac, satisfying, even exhilarating new play about justice in America. New York Magazine calls it majestic and incandescent. This Mockingbird is filled with breath and nuance and soul. This is the most successful American play in Broadway history, says 60 Minutes. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a new play by Aaron Sorkin. Tickets at telecharge.com. So with all that in mind, Senator, this journey that you're on at this moment,

it intersects with a financial crisis, the financial crisis. So what did you do once the financial system starts unraveling? Because you're an academic at this point. Yeah, I'm a teacher. How do you suddenly become somebody who is suddenly involved in trying to put out this fire? So I'm at home one night, late in the fall of 2008, and the markets have crashed. 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. So I'm having a

bunch of students over on a Thursday night for dinner for barbecue. And the guy is delivering the barbecue. Our golden retriever is doing big circles around me, you know, is in heaven smelling this barbecue. 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. I said, right. I called her up in her home in Massachusetts and asked her to come down and visit with me. And he says he wants me to come head up this congressional oversight panel, come to Washington and help oversee what's going on during this crisis. I was going to have within the Senate a task force

to take a look at what was going on with the financial meltdown. What Harry Reid wants her to do is to help Congress oversee this huge bank bailout, the $700 billion of taxpayer money that Congress authorized to save the banks in the weeks after the crash, and really to try to help understand what went wrong in the first place. It was very important for me as the leader to see somebody that I felt they really knew what they were talking about. And Harry Reid's really looking for somebody who's independent, an independent expert who is not all enmeshed in this whole world and can see, hopefully,

things a little bit more clearly. Elizabeth Warren was different. She was an academic. She had studied the financial world and had an insight into it that others didn't have. She had a different insight than people who were actually in the business community, and they were, in some ways, significantly different. I had no idea. I didn't even know what this particular thing was, this little regulatory thing that he was asking me to do. But my view was, our country's in a crisis.

And so I said, yes. My view was, oh, this could be cool. I'm going to have authority to be able to come in and say to the Treasury Department and to the Fed, I want to see your numbers and I want to see your plan. I want to see where this $700 billion that Congress had authorized. I want to see where that money is going and what you're getting in return, what kind of promises and changes from the banks. And so I'm thinking, ah, we're going to do this, right? So that night, I sat down and actually looked up the statute that authorized this Congressional Oversight Panel.

And it had some stuff about how people get appointed and how they get paid and so on. And then it just says, we'll write reports every 30 days. And I thought, whoa, what? So I kind of have this moment of, I'm still going to do it. I'll do whatever I've been asked to do. But I thought, okay, they gave me one tool. Write reports? I'll write reports.

And that's what I started doing. I write these reports every 30 days. I get my panel together. There are five of us all together. I'm the chair. And man, we just tear into it. But here was the thing. This was important to me.

This is the part I was starting to learn. The reports are very technical, but the front part is always written in plain English. And then I did videos. I'm Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel. I'm here to introduce our June oversight report. To explain what had happened, explain what the report's about. AIG was so seriously under-regulated that although 400 agencies were supposed to keep an eye on it, nobody had a complete picture. And explain what our recommendations are. The rescue of AIG continues to have a poisonous effect on

the marketplace. And just kept doing it every 30 days. By providing a complete rescue that called for no shared sacrifice among AIG and its creditors, the government fundamentally changed the rules of the game on Wall Street. So she's doing these reports and making these videos, and they're getting some traction, but obviously there's a limited audience for these things. And they're clear, but they're not exactly must-watch TV. So what I mostly am doing in those months is just explaining what went wrong. My job was to say, no, it is not too complicated to understand. Here's exactly what happened. Finally, that story lands a big audience. The story you told on John Seward Show.

That's right. Welcome back to Morning Joe. And here with us now, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel and professor at Harvard Law School, Elizabeth Warren. And it gets her this big public platform. Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren. We'll hear from her in just a moment. Harvard Oversight Panel chair Elizabeth Warren is going to join us live. She's going to be joining us live.

Welcome, Elizabeth. Appreciate you joining us. I'm always glad to be here. Professor Warren, thanks very much for joining us again. Will you run for president in 2012, please? It would be helpful. I have to go teach class in two hours. Oh my gosh.

That she then uses to advocate for what some believe to be radical regulatory shifts in the system. Much tougher protections for consumers, much tougher rules governing Wall Street, and a stronger watchdog overseeing it all. Now, a lot of people applauded that, but others thought it was crazy. I think Elizabeth Warren, in some ways, became the boogie woman. Wall Street hates her.

Her name is like a dirty word on Wall Street. I mean, I remember calling up bank CEOs at that time. And if I mentioned the name Elizabeth Warren, you know, they might have dropped the phone on me. There was incredible amount of anxiety, right? People like Robert Wolf, the CEO at the time of the American arm of UBS, the largest Swiss bank. And there was just an unknown. And I think that this just brought a new unknown to it with kind of a new sheriff in town. And Elizabeth Warren was a smart sheriff. She was a passionate sheriff.

And she had a plan that she's been talking about unbeknownst to us at that time for years. She was advocating for a complete rethink of the banking system. And that was anathema to the bankers because it would have fundamentally rewritten the rules. It would have meant that most of these people wouldn't even have jobs when it was over. Most of the bank CEOs felt that she was very smart. She was very passionate, but she's never been there, done that. There was no question that they were nervous that she would take her passion and angst

and then drive home these rules that no one was sure at the time whether they would be helpful or hurtful. So it was clear to me that in many ways, people were either scared of her or disliked her or felt like, you know, you've never really been there, so what do you know about it? So what is your overarching goal at this moment? What are you envisioning that you can get done in this corner of the regulatory

oversight system in the middle of this financial crisis? I started thinking this is a great moment to make government work again for the people instead of working for the big banks. I think of it as the fire, the crash of 2008 is enough that everyone will lift their heads and say, oh my God, we need to put the rules back in place. We need to get this system back on track. We need to make capitalism work, not just for the rich,

not use it as an instrument for theft. We need to make this work for everyone. So it's about, for me, it's about watching what's happening now as you're trying to steady the economy. But I'm very focused on what's going to come next. Right. So Warren's seeing this as the fire that should convince everybody that big changes needed to be implemented immediately,

like now in the moment, there's no time to let up. We got to do it. And in theory, most Democrats agreed with her on the big ideas. But when it came to the tactics and the timing, not so much. But when it came to the tactics and the timing, not so much. There wasn't great enthusiasm for Elizabeth among the economic team. People inside the Obama administration, senior people like David Axelrod will say they kind of saw her as a thorn in their side. They saw her as a relentless opponent of the financial industry at a time that they were trying to prop the financial industry up. of the financial industry at a time that they were trying to prop the financial industry up. Tim Geithner, who was the secretary treasury at the time, hardly could get along with her and fundamentally disagreed with her about what the solution should really be. Inside the administration, we literally feared a second Great Depression.

And the thing that would have triggered it would have been the collapse of the financial system. And that was not out of the question. So we were left to try and undergird the financial system while she wanted to prosecute it. And the feeling among the economic team was that this was deeply unhelpful at a time when we had a real crisis and that there may be a time and place for that, but first put out the fire. Secretary Geithner's position at that time under President Obama was to try to figure out a way to put as many people back to work and to invigorate the economy as quickly as humanly possible to save the system. Her view was, I'm going to blow up the system and it will be a better system in the long term. And if there's some collateral damage along the way or this crisis lasts longer, that might be an OK outcome. Politically, though, President Obama didn't have that time.

Hey, Elizabeth, you've got Tim Geithner, Secretary Geithner, in front of your oversight panel tomorrow. What is the one question you want answered on behalf of the American people? Oh, I still want to know, where'd the money go? Warren would haul Geithner up to Capitol Hill over and over to testify in front of her panel. This hearing is call to order. Thank you for being here today, Mr. Secretary. AIG has received about $70 billion in TARP money, about $100 billion in loans from the Fed. Do you know where the money went?

And just grill him, laying into him about how the administration was handling the bailout. And so now I'm caught in the question of what is your metric for success here? You believe we have a sense of how much is left in the way of toxic assets on their books? Absolutely. We have a dollar figure for that? Well, I'm again happy to...

Does Treasury plan to do that? How do you deal with that problem, Mr. Secretary? So where are you going? What would you like to know? I just want to know... And basically suggesting they weren't being tough enough on the banks. Mr. Secretary, I'm familiar with all that you think you've done to support housing overall.

The question is, Hampton is designed to— So, you have these sort of competing forces at work. Elizabeth Warren had a philosophical view about what the system should look like in the future. And Secretary Geithner and the Obama team would tell you they had a very grounded, realistic on the ground view of we need to get people back to work right now. And if we completely blow up the system, we have no idea what's on the other side. So it put us in a bind because on the one hand, we couldn't allow these institutions to collapse because the whole economy would totally collapse with it. But on the other hand, by stepping in to try and make sure they didn't collapse, we looked, you know, vaguely

complicit. And so having Elizabeth out there banging that drum, you know, added to the difficult atmospherics. You know, her rhetoric was inflammatory to a lot of people. So here's the thing about Elizabeth Warren as this is happening. She understands the position of the Obama administration. She gets the conundrum that they face. She gets the political forces at play. But she doesn't really care about being friends with Tim Geithner. She doesn't want to be friends with the Obama administration. She doesn't want to be friends with the Obama administration. She doesn't want to be friends with people on Wall Street.

She relishes the role of being the outsider. She's not trying to change the system from the inside. So she's willing to alienate the people who would have traditionally been her allies because she really believes she has this principled stand. And if she commits to that principled stand, her supporters won't just stick with her, but they'll grow. There was a lot of fighting over this and a lot of fighting over the words you used and the approach you took. David Axelrod, we spoke with. At times, he sensed that how you were approaching this could be pure and right

in spirit, but counterproductive in tactics. The word that gets used a lot to describe this period and how you are approaching these questions is that you alienated people. That's a word that gets used a lot. What's your reaction to that word? What does that mean to you? action to that word. What does that mean to you? You know, I always heard that as you wouldn't play nice with the banks and the big donors. And I just didn't care about the banks and the big donors. If you thought I was wrong in what families needed, tell me. But nobody ever did. You know what everybody said to me? It's a great idea, but don't even try to do it. Because the banks call the shots, the big money calls the shots, and they're going to keep this from getting done. And so there comes this time in 2010 when the economy is now no longer in complete freefall,

at least. The administration is now ready to act on some of these ideas of hers, including perhaps her biggest idea, which was this new agency that she had conceived you know, I could do that and I'd be very enthusiastic about it, or I could spend the next 10 months looking over Tim Geithner's shoulder. So it was, you know, about as subtle as a screen door on a submarine. You know, the message was very, very clear. She's basically saying, I can make your life hell by going out on TV every single day and continuing to tell everybody that I can find that you're in bed with the banks and I will. You know, I took that message to the president and he basically said, tell her to shut up, let us pass this bill, and then we can talk about this. Good afternoon, everybody. It has been almost three years since the financial crisis pulled the economy into a deep recession.

He wanted to bring her in because she was the author of the idea. I mean, she was the most prominent promoter of it. Elizabeth was sounding the alarm on predatory lending and the financial pressures on middle class families. And she was someone who he felt would be a very strong advocate, and he wanted that. She's become perhaps the leading voice in our country on behalf of consumers. But he also had to manage the politics of the financial reform. And let's face it, she's done it while facing some very tough opposition and drawing a fair amount of heat.

Fortunately, she's very tough opposition and drawing a fair amount of heat. Fortunately, she's very tough. You know, Elizabeth Warren was deeply, deeply controversial among members of Congress, among members of the Senate, not just Republicans, but Democrats who had ties to the financial industry. Over the past year, she has done an extraordinary job. She was seen as an inconvenient voice out there and one who they thought was unfair in her attacks. And there was a real resistance to her.

As part of her charge, I asked Elizabeth to find the best possible choice for director of the Bureau. We wanted her, but we had to navigate that. And that's who we found in Richard Cordray. So ultimately, she's passed over. She doesn't get to run the things she created, arguably because she was so fierce

in trying to advocate for it in the first place. Thank you very much, and congratulations, Richard. Do you ever wonder, Senator, if the things that make you such a potent communicator and storyteller and have earned you a significant base of support, made you a front runner in the Democratic primary, that that might make it harder to actually solve the problems you've been so nimble at diagnosing and that you've devoted so

much of your career to studying all the way back to the 80s and 90s? That word alienating. No, actually I don't. And I'll tell you why. Because your vision is very uncompromising. The question becomes, are you uncompromising? It's not uncompromising. Look, the consumer agency, for example, did we get everything we wanted in the consumer agency? No. I can compromise when it's the right thing to compromise. You know what I think a lot of folks are talking about on this? When you ask this question about kind of this get-along notion, it's how much are you going to yield to the corruption in the system? The people who are handing out all the campaign

contributions, and they've got all the lobbyists, and they've got the bought and paid for experts whose voices they lift up, and they give money to the think tanks because they like the system how it works. And when they can't fight back on substance, they go after the messenger. And they say, oh, well, too uncompromising. Too uncompromising. Well, yeah, if the question is, do I think that Washington should be making policy based on a revolving door with Wall Street? Yeah, I don't think it ought to be doing that. And we built a really great economy for decades in which that didn't happen. What I'm asking for, I believe, is ultimately quite reasonable. The system has been broken for decades. Donald Trump has just accelerated, and now we see it big time. That means, very much like following the crash of 2008, That means, very much like following the crash of 2008, the door for real change has opened a crack. Now, we could just say we want to go back to business as usual, the way it was before Donald Trump came along. But not me.

I see the door opened a crack, just like it did following the financial crisis. But it was hard to get through that door for you. It's not about me. Put down your shoulder and hit as hard as you can at that door. Open it up and make the changes we need to make as a country. So the big question is, if Elizabeth Warren is president, how hard is she really going to lean into that door to try to crack it open? You know, how much is she going to stick with this principle based view? Is she going to need help from the other side?

And is she willing to alienate not just the other side, but her own allies in the name of principle? She's always been fighting as the outsider. And what happens once you become the insider? Does an uncompromising vision work for a president? It's not about compromising. I think that's just not the key point here. It's about having a vision about who you want to work for. And then you make decisions as you go along.

There are times to compromise, but you don't start out by saying, you know what? People are going to oppose this, so let's just start asking for only 2%. That's just not the way to go about it. You lay out the vision and say, that's where I'm going to head in this, because this is what I believe in. I believe in what we can do together. I believe in the America we can build. But we've got to have a vision for that. It can't all be about just, you know, let's do just slight changes. Because understand this, Republicans are going to fight us on slight changes. So if you're going to be in a fight, make it a fight worth having and make it a fight that will inspire millions of people to join. Thank you, Senator. You bet.

I think she's signaling here that she understands that being president is different from being an advocate pushing from the outside. But if her brand fundamentally is to be uncompromising, if that is the brand, if the brand is to be principled, it's the thing that got her that public following in the first place. Even when she knew it was going to alienate her from some of the people closest to her. What happens if she becomes president and she feels like she has to compromise? Do her supporters come with her? We'll be right back. West Side Story is an explosion of every imaginable idea of what a musical can be, says New York Magazine. The radioactive fallout must still be descending on Broadway this morning,

says New York Herald Tribune. The New York Times calls it the summit of the American musical theater. It's unlike anything America has known before, says The New Yorker. It's the anthem of New York City. Now in previews. Opens February 6th, 2020. West Side Story on Broadway. Tickets at telecharge.com. Here's what else you need to know.

I don't want to tempt fate because clearly lots of results are still coming in and we're still only dealing with projections. But at this stage, it does look as though this one nationnation conservative government

has been given a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done. In Britain's closely watched general election, Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared to be headed for a major victory that would allow him to fulfill his promise of pulling the UK out of the European Union by the end of January. And not just to get Brexit done, but to unite this country

and to take it forward and to focus on the priorities of the British people. Exit polls conducted by three major British broadcasters projected that Johnson's Conservative Party would win an 86-seat majority in the House of Commons, an outcome that extinguishes the possibility that Britain might somehow remain in the EU. The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Annie Brown, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung, Alexandra Lee Young, Jonathan Wolfe, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Mark George, Luke Vanderplug, Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard, Stella Tan, Lauren Jackson, and Julia Simon. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you on Monday.