Putting Republican fear to good use

I enjoy reading this commentator's columns.

Will consumer advocate Warren run for Senate? - by Darrell Delamaide


WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, seems to be the motto in mind for financial consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren as Democrats reportedly are urging her to challenge Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts in the 2012 election. The Harvard professor spearheaded the effort to get a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, and has been tasked by President Obama with helping to set up the new agency, designed to police predatory lending, credit card abuses and other attempts by financial institutions o fleece their customers.

Somehow the Republicans have managed to spin this as an anti-business, heavy-handed government regulatory nightmare, not a consumer protection initiative.

Banks, understandably, don’t like the idea of the new agency and don’t like Warren, and they have persuaded 44 Republican Senators – by means it’s easy to guess at – to block the nomination of Warren or anyone else as first director of the new agency. 

Means easy to guess? Can he possibly mean bribery ... er, campaign contributions? {We don't have bribery in the US; we have campaign contributions.}

The seat that Brown won in a special election after Kennedy’s death in 2009 is one of those Senate Democrats would love to capture next year. Brown is trying to walk the tightrope between the tea party’s stringent orthodoxy requirements and a left-leaning Massachusetts electorate, and is seen as exceedingly vulnerable.

Brown has lurched left in some cases, but managing to placate the left and the right is a miracle beyond his power.


Massachusetts’ Brown has already broken with the Ryan proposal, arguing in an op-ed that escalating medical costs might outstrip government voucher subsidies in the plan, leaving seniors uncovered – the crux, by coincidence, of Democratic opposition to the plan.

It is a small wonder how Brown won in 2009.