A Fighting Chance

There’s no ignoring Barney Frank, and he was no more relaxed in his kitchen than he was on the floor of the United States Congress. He sat me down with my back wedged up next to the refrigerator, then jumped right in.

In his usual rapid-fire delivery, he said it was clear that families had gotten cheated in the mortgage market, and he liked the idea of the consumer agency to clean things up. (Yes!) But his first obligation was to make sure we could really get something done. Financial reform was already too complicated, and he was worried the consumer agency might have to wait. In the fight for any financial reform, we would be up against an army of lobbyists, and he thought it might make more sense to take them on one issue at a time. If we tried to push through everything at once, we could lose it all. So he would start with the bank regulations that obviously needed fixing, focusing on the rules covering derivatives, capital reserve requirements, and so forth.

The same reasons that made Congressman Frank uneasy about including the consumer agency from the start made me want to move it to the front of the line. I was sure the lobbyists would fight tooth and nail against the new agency, and I worried that if the rest of the reform package made it through first, no one would feel any great urgency about continuing to battle the lobbyists. We had to make this agency a priority. I figured this was our moment: now or never.

Wedged up against Barney Frank’s refrigerator, I wanted to talk about all the problems the new agency could fix and all the families it could help. But Congressman Frank knew all that, and he cared as much about these families as anyone did. Besides, he didn’t disagree about policy—he was arguing over how to get things done in Washington. This was about politics, and he knew a billion times more about that than I did.

So I took a breath and tried a totally different tack. I said I wanted to tell him a story. He was clearly impatient, but he nodded for me to go ahead.

I told him that when I was a kid, I would hear stories about my grandparents’ lives in Oklahoma. In the early 1900s, my grandfather was a carpenter, doing repairs and building small homes and the occasional one-room schoolhouse in Indian Territory. My grandmother raised ten children. My mother was the baby, and she still lived at home when the Great Depression hit. I don’t think my grandparents knew anyone who owned stocks or other investments. For them, the Depression had nothing to do with Wall Street and the stock market crash. It was about local bank failures and families losing their savings and their farms.

My grandmother had never been very political, and she sure didn’t follow high finance. But decades later, she was still repeating her line that she knew two things about Franklin Roosevelt: He made it safe to put money in banks and—she always paused here and smiled—he did a lot of other good things.

And that was my pitch to Congressman Frank. Start with something that people understand, something that solves a problem they can see. Do that, and then they’ll have confidence in the work you do to fix the parts they can’t see. Yes, derivatives and credit default swaps were huge problems. He was totally right about that. But for a lot of people, those were just words that fly by in news reports. On the other hand, a mortgage broker who lies about the terms of a mortgage he sells to a homeowner—that’s something everyone understands. Hidden fees on a credit card bill—that’s a problem millions of people had been living with for a long time. Fine print and confusing legalese—everyone had signed loans that were loaded with it.

Start simple. Fix something people can see.

My whole pitch might have lasted two minutes, tops. Congressman Frank sat still for maybe ten seconds, then said, “I get it. Let’s do it.”

He would push to get the consumer agency into the reform package, right out of the gate. Wowee-zowee! It was a cartwheel moment.

Somewhere in that conversation, we stopped being Congressman Frank and Professor Warren. From that day on, it was Barney and Elizabeth.

Barney was good to his word. He fought like a tiger to keep the consumer agency in the financial reform package. With Barney on board, the agency wouldn’t be left at the station like so much unclaimed baggage. We had a new champion, the best we could ever have hoped for.

The chances that we’d get a consumer agency were skyrocketing. Now, instead of no chance at all, we were up to almost no chance at all.

Announcement Day at the White House