"We need a new model: If you can't explain it, you can't sell it," says Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard University law professor who is head of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program and who first suggested a Financial Product Safety Commission in a 2007 magazine article.
Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry write that Warren may wind up leading the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that President Obama has proposed to Congress, if it's approved, but she's not saying if she's even interested in doing do. If she's not, that would suit critics such as Thomas Cooley, dean of New York University's Stern School of Business, just fine. "She is an ideological crusader," he tells the reporters. "She is a person who will stir up a lot of trouble." In a Forbes magazine column, he accused her of "waging a self-righteous holy war."
Warren responds that detractors who accuse her of elitism probably confuse it with prairie-born populism that she inherited from her grandparents, who built one-room Indian schools during the Great Depression.
Time named Warren on of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in May. Huffington Post editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington is a believer. "She's been courageous in a culture where every other official is checking to see if what they're saying is going to affect their career," she says. "If she doesn't get the job, it would really mean that the special interests have won."
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