A Fighting Chance

I was miserable. I had stage fright—gut-wrenching, stomach-turning, bile-filled stage fright. And I was stuck in a gloomy little bathroom, about to go on The Daily Show.

At home, Bruce and I always recorded the show on TiVo and delighted in watching Jon Stewart skewer people who needed skewering. But now I was having serious doubts about going through with this. I had talked to reporters and been interviewed plenty of times, but this was different. At any second, the whole interview could turn into a giant joke—and what if the joke turned on the work I was trying to do?

For the zillionth time, I asked myself why on God’s green earth I had agreed to sit down with Jon Stewart. For the zillionth time, I gave myself the same answer: Because oversight will mean something only if a lot of people—millions of people—get engaged. The Daily Show gave me one more way to draw people in, to talk about what had gone wrong and what we should do about it.

So I washed out my mouth with cold water and went back to the little waiting room. Pretty soon a director was pulling me at breakneck speed through narrow hallways, past tiny rooms, and behind heavy dark curtains. We came to an opening onto the stage, and then I stepped out into the lights, feeling like an astronaut who had just left the space capsule—except I hadn’t practiced this maneuver back on my home planet.

When I sat down opposite Jon Stewart, what struck me first was how close we were. Stewart seemed to be mere inches from my face—and he immediately began hurling baseballs straight at my forehead. The beginning was a disaster. We rambled through questions about TARP and the Congressional Oversight Panel. I fumbled while Stewart made jokes. The way I heard it, his message was clear: The whole idea that our tiny little panel would be able to watch over the Treasury’s $700 billion bailout was idiotic.

The first couple of minutes were terrible, and then it got worse. Jon Stewart got an acronym for a Treasury program wrong and I automatically corrected him. “P-PIP,” I interrupted. (For the record, it’s pronounced “pee-pip.” Three-year-old Lavinia thought this was hilarious bathroom humor.) The instant “P-PIP” popped out of my mouth, I was horrified. What was I doing correcting Jon Stewart on his own show? We locked eyes for an instant, and I must have made a face, because Stewart asked me, “Madam, are you about to curse?”

I endured the wave of laughter from the audience, and then he dropped the obvious question: “What does P-PIP stand for?”

Uh-oh. Pause. “I forget.”

In the instant after I said “I forget,” my heart slowed down. No need to stress now: my work in Washington was over. I thought, Well, this is it. I’ll call Senator Reid tomorrow and resign. If I can’t even remember the names of the TARP programs, then I should quit now. Maybe they can get someone to run this panel who isn’t an idiot.

Stewart asked a few more questions, and then, mercifully, it was time for a commercial. As I started to bolt out of my chair, Stewart grabbed my forearm and said something like “You wanted to deliver an important message here, and you didn’t get to it. If I gave you one sentence, what would you tell people?”

We looked hard at each other again, our heads inches apart, and then I told him what I really thought. He said, “Okay, hold on.”

By now we were well into the commercial break, and the stage director came over to hustle me off the set. Stewart said, “No, she stays.” The manager said, “No, we’re out of time.” Each repeated their statements with a little more intensity; then Stewart insisted with the air of The Boss: “She stays. I know how we can make room.”

The stage director backed away, and Stewart looked around at the camera and fiddled with some papers. Then he warned me: “You don’t have much time.”

A couple of seconds later, the cameras were rolling again. I thought he would pitch me a question that would give me a chance to say on camera what I had just said to him. But no: he asked me some other question. I thought, What the heck, I’m going to say what I have to say. And that’s what I did. It was a little longer than this (and a lot more rambling), but basically it boiled down to the following:

This crisis didn’t have to happen. America had a boom-and-bust cycle from the 1790s to the 1930s, with a financial panic every ten to fifteen years. But we figured out how to fix it. Coming out of the Great Depression, the country put tough rules in place that gave us fifty years without a financial crisis. But in the 1980s, we started pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric, and we found ourselves back in the boom-and-bust cycle. When this crisis is over, there will be a once-in-a-generation chance to rewrite the rules. What we set in place will determine whether our country continues down this path toward a boom-and-bust economy or whether we reestablish an economy with more stability that gives ordinary folks a chance at real prosperity.