So it turns out that the Elizabeth Warren rap video that went “viral” this week is actually a made-in-Hollywood production.
Elizabeth Warren proposed the financial reform agency in an article in the summer of 2007.
You know the video, don’t you? The one in which a struggling comedian named Ryan Anthony Lumas, dressed in a cowboy outfit, high-steps his way through two minutes of catchy, if ersatz, rap, with lyrics like Sheriff Warren’s what we need-o/ She’s not about the money and the green-o... /She wants to expose the banks and all the greed/ and get rid of unnecessary fees/Which means more money in my pocket?
The group behind the video is the Main Street Brigade. But when you call the Main Street Brigade, you get the Santa Monica office of Hans Zimmer, a prolific Hollywood composer. The two women listed as the Brigade’s contacts run Mr. Zimmer’s new philanthropic/activist arm.
They are also the ones who recruited Mr. Lumas to write and star in the video — he actually makes his living selling televisions at Best Buy — then spent an all-nighter editing it, and e-mailed it to the Elizabeth Warren-obsessed Huffington Post, where it had its premiere a week ago Friday.
“We’re Trojan-horsing people with the messaging,” said Bonnie Abaunza, one of the Brigadettes. In addition to Mr. Zimmer, supporters of the Main Street Brigade include the directors James Brooks and Ron Howard as well as other Hollywood celebrities. Its purpose is to back the work of Americans for Financial Reform, a large coalition of organizations pushing for financial reform. The coalition’s Web site lists the subjects it follows, including foreclosure, derivatives and mortgage reform.
And, of course, Elizabeth Warren.
The group desperately wants President Obama to name her to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a key part of the recently signed financial reform legislation. “Tell President Obama: Nominate Elizabeth to Head the C.F.P.B,” reads the coalition’s home page. When you click through, you get the text of a message that can be e-mailed directly to the White House, which points out, among other things, that the new bureau was her idea.
But why, I asked Ms. Abaunza, is it so important that Ms. Warren lead the new agency? Isn’t it enough that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau got passed — especially since the banks were so intent on killing it?
“She’s the people’s choice,” Ms. Abaunza replied. She said she was blown away when she watched a video of a speech by Ms. Warren that outlined all the ways a new consumer bureau could make things better for borrowers.
“The best way to explain it is that she speaks truth to power,” Ms. Abaunza continued. “She speaks about how people have been ripped off in a way that everybody understands. Although she is a Harvard professor, she doesn’t speak in an elitist way. She is a grandmother. She is from Oklahoma. I like the fact that she says ‘golly.’ She engenders this trust immediately. Because she is very honest.”
Also, she walks on water.
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O.K., so she doesn’t walk on water. Which isn’t to say that Ms. Abaunza isn’t right. Indeed, the incredible groundswell around Ms. Warren’s candidacy appears to be putting President Obama in a tough spot.
His Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, by all accounts, would prefer to see Michael S. Barr, the assistant secretary for financial institutions, get the job. Others in the administration worry that she will impose tough new rules on the banks that will make it harder for them to nurse themselves back to health and hence the economy. But it is going to be awfully hard for him to turn his back on Ms. Warren.
With the president on vacation, nobody expects him to make this appointment until he returns at the end of August. But if he chooses anyone but her, he will be widely seen as helping the banks at the expense of the rest of us — something the government has been accused of doing far too often since those grim days of September 2008. With the midterm elections fast approaching, such accusations are not going to be terribly helpful to Democrats. Just a few days ago, 41 Democratic members of Congress sent Mr. Obama a letter pleading with him to appoint Ms. Warren.
How did this happen? How did a once-obscure Harvard Law professor become such a powerful touchstone?
Partly, it is because she really did come up with the idea. Ms. Warren’s views about banks and borrowers were largely formed early in her career when she and two colleagues, Teresa A. Sullivan, now the president of the University of Virginia, and Jay Lawrence Westbrook, a law professor at the University of Texas, conducted two seminal studies about people who file for bankruptcy.
In the late 1980s, when the first study was unveiled in a book the three of them wrote, “As We Forgive Our Debtors,” the root causes of bankruptcy weren’t well understood. The bank lobby routinely complained that Americans with the means to pay their debts were taking “the easy way out” by filing for bankruptcy. The empirical work done by the Warren-Sullivan-Westbrook team proved those claims false.
People who filed for bankruptcy were genuinely in over their heads, the researchers found. They had accumulated debt they couldn’t repay because they had lost their jobs or had some other life event that robbed them of their ability to earn a decent paycheck. They were often middle class, homeowners even. They filed for bankruptcy because they were desperate. Looking through thousands of bankruptcy filings, Mr. Westbrook said a few days ago, “you got a sense of human beings in real trouble.” He added, “All of us were very much affected by what we found in those files.”
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