Elizabeth Warren is a One-Issue Candidate

POLITICO recently asked the punditariat if Elizabeth Warren was too “elitist” to be a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. How’s that for a charming question? Here’s my response:

Elizabeth Warren is a one-issue candidate. Usually, these campaigns don’t have staying power in high-profile elections. Except Warren’s issue just happens to impact almost every single American family. She has become a crusader to root out sources of economic insecurity within our financial sector. In the context of the Great Recession, she can connect her crusade to the classic bread-and-butter concerns of families across the state of Massachusetts.

Before she became a household name (at least to Jon Stewart viewers and POLITICO readers), she wrote an excellent book, The Two Income Trap, that described how middle-class families were increasingly at risk by their reliance on accessing credit and having multiple income streams. Even before the recession began shedding jobs, Warren was sounding the alarm about irresponsible lending practices which were becoming endemic in the credit card and mortgage industries. She saw how emerging business models were stripping assets away from hard-working families rather than provide appropriate financial services. In response, Warren was an early proponent of creating a consumer financial protection agency that would police the marketplace to protect consumers rather than the banks. She displayed her effective communication skills by giving this idea a tagline: If it’s good enough for microwaves, it’s good enough for mortgages. She has been an important part of the debate since.

She knows that being able to effectively manage financial resources is an essential component of charting a path toward economic security. This is a need that extends up and down the income scale, so she can talk to voters all over the state. She also knows that a bunch of things have gone wrong in our system of delivering financial services. High-cost and low-value products have created new profits centers for both banks and the growing array of non-bank providers, but they have hurt the rest of us. Not only have they made the path toward economic security more perilous, they actually played a role in the debilitating economic crisis.

Even though the monied interests of the financial sector and the Chamber of Commerce effectively blocked her nomination to lead the new agency, Warren more than held her own. It is an experience that should serve her well on the campaign trail. The CFPB is now the law of the land. She won’t be the sheriff, but she has made sure that the cops are being sent out on the beat. In her campaign, she is likely to craft a message that links economic recovery and reform of the financial sector to strengthening the economic security of families. This is a one-issue message that may resonate broadly with voters next year.