The Watchdog: Elizabeth Warren

Who was the coach of that team, he asked her.

Guy V. Lewis, she answered.

What was his trademark, he asked her.

He carried around a checkered towel, she answered.

(Warren was being kind here. Lewis’s most conspicuous trademark was his staggering incompetence in big games.)

Satisfied, the man sat down and Warren went back to being loud. Gradually, the crowd began to get audibly impatient with her again. Suddenly, the large gentleman stood up and addressed his colleagues.

“Leave the lady alone,” he told them. “She’s got history.”

You can understand that moment when Warren, 60, talks about the political heat inherent in the position she now holds. The great cause of her life has been defending middle-class Americans against what she calls the “tricks and traps” the nation’s financial institutions devise to separate those citizens from their money. She was talking about the dangers of the subprime mortgage binge long before the bubble finally popped. She is equally scornful of how the credit card companies bury their real brigandage under a blizzard of sub-paragraphs and dependent clauses. And ever since last November, when Senate majority leader Harry Reid persuaded her to take charge of the Congressional Oversight Panel, and even though she is aware that the panel does not have any real enforcement powers, Warren has become a burr under the saddle of official Washington -- plain-spoken, invariably polite, intolerant of business-school persiflage (“That’s a word we don’t use enough!” she exclaims), and utterly contemptuous of conventional wisdom. These are not qualities that endear you to the courtier set inside the Beltway. Warren got in the face of then Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and stayed there to the point where Paulson’s staff began sniping at her in the newspapers. She gently -- but relentlessly -- prodded Paulson’s successor, Timothy Geithner, until Geithner dragged himself before the panel to testify.