The NPR Politics Podcast - How Elizabeth Warren's Bankruptcy Research Sparked Her Progressive Politics

Episode Date: December 27, 2019

This week, the NPR Politics Podcast investigates defining moments in the lives of four top Democratic presidential candidates to understand how those experiences shape their politics today.Elizabeth Warren did not begin her professional career as a progressive firebrand. In the 1980s, she was a moderate-minded academic and law professor at the University of Texas, just beginning to her research into Americans who have declared bankruptcy.Over time, that work changed Warren and cultivated that kinds of progressive economic ideals that define her presidential run today.This episode: campaign correspondent Asma Khalid, campaign correspondent Scott Detrow, and White House correspondent Tamara Keith.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, real quick before we start the show. Since impeachment got underway, the squad here at NPR Politics has made more than 50 daily episodes. Sometimes more than daily to keep you informed about what's happening and why it matters. And we're able to do that and to put it out there for free because of support from listeners like you. You and everybody else who listens to our shows are the biggest source of financial support for NPR's member stations.

No matter where or how you hear us every day, the fact is that the stations are the reason this podcast exists in the first place. So if you enjoy our podcast, please take a second to give back. Donate online to support us and your local station by heading to donate.npr.org slash politics. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign. I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the campaign.

And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And all this week, we're taking a closer look at the top four candidates in the Democratic primary race. We each chose a candidate and reported out stories about the turning point for them in their lives, the moment that seemed to transform them personally or professionally into the candidate that we see out campaigning today. And Asma, today we are going to talk about Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and a profile that you worked on and put together. Tell us what part of Warren's life you focused on. So Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is relatively new to politics.

I don't think everyone always remembers that. But for much of her career, she was a teacher. Then she was a law school professor. She first jumped into the Senate in 2012. But prior to that, for years and years, she was a law professor. And so in talking to former students, former colleagues of hers, I was interested in better understanding how the senator went from being a registered Republican to the progressive firebrand that she is today. And a lot of her progressive viewpoints seem to come from her experience and her research. Exactly. And that's what I dug into was specifically this time period where she began to study bankruptcy at the University of Texas in Austin.

All right, let's take a few minutes and listen to that profile. And then after we hear it, we'll talk about it. In the fall of 1981, Calvin Johnson used to walk a block and a half from his house to hitch a ride to work with Elizabeth Warren. They were both teaching at the University of Texas Law School in Austin and would debate public policy during their commutes. We would go in and we would argue all the way in and then we would take a temporary respite to teach our courses and do research and then we'd argue all the way back. Johnson, who has long considered himself a liberal Democrat, remembers thinking Warren's opinions were strange. She was quite consistently pro-business and I'm sure she would not like to be called anti-consumer.

But he did think she was anti-consumer. He remembers one particularly fierce debate about public utility accounting. It's wonky. Johnson says at the time, utility companies were raking in huge profits and abusing the ratepayers. She came out very strongly in favor of business, industry, the utilities. Warren was not overtly partisan at the time, but she was guided by a law and economics movement that was sweeping through universities. Critics say this movement was trying to proselytize professors into believing a conservative pro-market worldview. And Warren was a believer,

according to some of her colleagues. Around this time, she also became increasingly interested in bankruptcy. And when she talks about her attitude from the time, she sounds kind of Reagan-esque. Here she is reading from her memoir, A Fighting Chance. I might not have said so at the time, but I think I was on the lookout for cheaters and deadbeats as a way to explain who was filing for bankruptcy. In 1978, Congress had passed a new bankruptcy code. There was an enormous amount of contention over the new code. That's Warren's longtime research collaborator, Jay Westbrook. He still teaches law at the University of Texas.

The creditors were saying, oh, people are just getting away with murder. They're not paying their debts. They're getting an easy discharge. And we wanted to know if that was true or not. So Westbrook and Warren helped lead a massive multi-state study to figure out who was filing for bankruptcy and why. Here's one of Warren's former research assistants, Kimberly Winnick, who helped her go through a lot of the files. And this is back when it was all paper. And we'd show up with a portable copying machine. And, you know, it rolled like

a rollerboard suitcase. And you get it there with reams of paper and start copying. They would then sift through the paper files. Catherine Nicholson, another one of Warren's research assistants, says they were looking for answers to specific questions. Was the debtor employed? Were there medical bills? I mean, what kind of debts did they have? Was it unsecured debt? Did they run up everything on credit cards? Had there been a divorce in the family recently?

That's just empirical data. That's Warren's other research assistant, Kimberly Winnick, again. I mean, that is how she works. Ask a question that's a clean question and get an answer. Winnick took three classes with Warren, and she says one thing she admires about her old professor is that when the facts became irrefutable, Warren was willing to reexamine her own opinions. Winnick doesn't remember talking politics with Warren, but she had a hunch her old teacher thought people filing for bankruptcy were gaming the system. The research

ended up illustrating a different story. Here's Warren's co-author Jay Westbrook again. She saw more of the very difficult side of life of the people who go through the bankruptcy process. She saw their struggles and she saw a variety of ways in which the credit industry manipulates things in order to get them ever deeper into debt. The end result of the research was unprecedented, essentially the first independent data-driven analysis on bankruptcy in the country. It resulted in two books and drove almost everything Warren has done since. She became known as a bankruptcy expert. She worked as a legal consultant for some big corporations like Dow Chemical and for consumers in a major class action lawsuit against Sears.

Recently, Warren's campaign disclosed that she made nearly $2 million through her corporate legal work. Then, in the 1990s, Warren also joined the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. Liz is the kind of person that when she sees somebody doing something that she thinks really is going to screw things up, she's not going to be quiet about it. So Westbrook says Warren started speaking up loudly in political circles about financial issues. It's just that none of it was in the context of being partisan until it was. Warren's work on the Bankruptcy Commission made it clear Republicans in Congress were not her ally. Old colleagues insist all these years of studying bankruptcy changed Warren. It's why they believe she eventually registered as a

Democrat in 1996. The thing is, this bankruptcy research did not just affect Warren. It left a deep impression on how people who collaborated with Warren see her. People like Katherine Nicholson, who worked as her research assistant for three years. I've known Elizabeth Warren forever. She cares about families and their struggles. So come next year, it'll be a hard choice for me in the ballot box. It'll be a hard choice because Nicholson,

who now lives near Omaha, Nebraska, describes herself as a conservative Catholic, a Paul Ryan sort of Republican. She voted for Donald Trump in 2016. However, I believe in Elizabeth Warren, too. In the time since Nicholson met her, Warren has evolved from being described as an economic conservative to arguably one of the fiercest liberal consumer advocates in the country. Some of Warren's progressive critics say this evolution makes her inauthentic. Some who've known her argue it's why voters should believe her. Great profile, Asma. We are going to take a quick break. And when we get back,

we're going to talk about what lessons can be learned about Elizabeth Warren from this particular time period in her life. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Uber. Uber is committed to safety and to time period in her life. Thank you. And before we get back to the show, a quick reminder, if you haven't already, please pause the podcast and head to donate.npr.org slash politics to support the show and your local member station. Unless you're driving or holding a baby, then you can wait. Just don't forget to do it. All right. Back to the show.

And we're back. And Asma, what struck you most in putting this profile together? So when I talked to former colleagues of Elizabeth Warren's and I also spoke to former research assistants of hers, it seems that there's a pretty clear line from the really heavily detailed evidence-based work that she did. And that's sort of her reputation on the campaign trail is this woman who has a plan for everything, down to the political evolution that she has today. And to me, that was really interesting, because there was one in particular research assistant of hers that we heard from in the piece, who is a Republican to this day. She is somebody who voted for Donald Trump, who says that she believes Elizabeth Warren because she worked with her, you know, for years on this bankruptcy

research, saw just sort of how she deals with evidence, how she deals with fact based reporting and believes her. And she said, you know, ultimately, even though I'm a Republican, I'm a believer of Elizabeth Warren's. To me, that was really interesting. But it's also to me kind of juxtaposed to the to the, you know, complaints or the criticisms that you sometimes hear about Warren as being this inauthentic candidate. And you hear that, you know, from folks on the left who don't see her to be, you know, progressive enough. And you also hear that from from folks on the right who try to paint her as being dishonest, whether it was about her, you know, her Native American heritage or whether or not she was genuinely fired from a job because she was pregnant. And I think that to me, there have been these questions around her

authenticity and to hear from people who've known her for a long time sort of point to the very fact that they like her is her being authentic. I thought that juxtaposition of her being authentic or inauthentic and how people can see totally different things in her to me was fascinating. Did the people you talked to who knew her at this period of time, were they like surprised to see her ultimately run for president? Or was it something that they said, you know, in retrospect, I could see the path? I would say almost everybody I talked to seemed genuinely surprised that she was running for president. And I think that that's sort of a novelty when you get to doing candidate profiles on people after a while. A lot of times you hear, well, you know, I knew a little Johnny back in second grade said he was going to run for president. I'm making that up. I don't know who

Johnny is, but you get my point. I think President Obama did at one point say he was going to run for president when he was a child. So, I mean, you get this sense of this from a lot of people. I would say people who worked with her very closely got the sense that, above all, she was an academic. I heard that from her closest research collaborator at the University of Texas. He's worked with her for years, said, above all, you've got to understand, he said, I am an academic. She was, to a large extent, an academic. And an academic who he believes ultimately fell into this because she became a leading expert researcher on bankruptcy was then brought on to this National Bankruptcy Review Commission. And in many ways, he sees, I mean, this is his interpretation of things.

He felt like she wasn't really a partisan until she became a partisan because she realized that she didn't have that many Republican allies on this bankruptcy research work on Capitol Hill, nor did she feel she had entirely a whole bunch of Democratic allies always either. Did reporting this profile out help you understand anything about the way she's running for president? I do think you have a sense that she is a woman who likes to understand quantitative information and then deliver that story out, you know, at times even in a narrative form. And you saw that with a lot of the bankruptcy research that she did. Her collaborators will say that, you know, they dug through these files and they saw the personal stories. And some of them say that they remember specific anecdotes about individual people who had filed for bankruptcy because it's really hard to, you know, forget those stories. Those are really difficult experiences that people lived through. And I do think you see a lot of that

from her on the campaign trail. You see her telling, you know, narrative stories when you hear her out on the stump. She's a pretty good storyteller, I would say, whether or not you endorse her vision for the presidency. And Scott, you've seen her out there as well. I mean, she is able to, I would say, really captivate a crowd quite a bit when she's able to tell these personal narrative stories about a broader political point. Yeah, definitely. I think that background as a teacher really comes through in the way that she has one of the strongest, if not the strongest, general stump speeches that she gives to voters every time. All right. Well, we are going to leave it there. Please make sure to

listen to the rest of the Candidates series that we put out this week. Those episodes are in your podcast feed. And you can chat about them in our Facebook group at n.pr slash politics podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the 2020 campaign. I'm Scott Tetra. I cover the campaign. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.