A Fighting Chance

April rolled into May and then June. I went on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and questioned Tim Geithner in our first public COP hearing with him. Ted Kennedy called to tell me he was pushing hard to build support for the new agency. “We’re working it,” he said. Classes ended at Harvard, and COP kept churning out reports, month after month.

Early that summer, Bruce and I took off for a family reunion in Oklahoma. By now, all three of my brothers had retired. In a very sad twist of fate, all three were widowers. All three had lost their wives too early, to cancer. Don Reed had been blessed to find a wonderful new partner, so he had remarried, but David and John were alone.

I was eating barbecue and visiting with my nephew Mark when my cell phone buzzed. An official-sounding voice came on the line and said: “The president will be announcing his financial reform package in two days at the White House, and you are invited.”

Holy cow—the White House! A presidential announcement!

I immediately told the whole clan. Even Don Reed and David, both dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, were excited. (Of course John, who was a President Obama man, was even more excited.)

I changed my plane tickets so I could fly straight back to Washington. Then I had a moment of panic. I’d come from Boston to Oklahoma carrying a suitcase with my usual family reunion attire—shorts, T-shirts, swimsuit, and sandals. I couldn’t exactly wear that kind of gear to the White House. Besides, I’d gotten barbecue sauce on my best shorts. I didn’t have time to get to my own closet in Boston, so I had to go on an emergency shopping trip.

My two nieces, Michelle and Melinda, went with me to the mall in northwest Oklahoma City. Time was short, and I ended up grabbing something fast in one of those desperate shopping moves that makes me wonder afterward what on earth I’d been thinking.

Two days later, on June 17, 2009, I was standing in a long line outside the White House gate. It was hot, and I was discovering that the fabric on my new jacket itched like crazy and made a funny whooshing sound when I walked. The new shoes made my toes throb. Great start for an afternoon at the White House.

After we were all processed through security, we were herded into a big room inside the White House. People milled around and talked with one another. I spotted a couple of familiar faces from Capitol Hill and a few people I knew from the nonprofits, but I didn’t recognize most of the people in the room.

Finally, we were called into an ornate room that was jammed with tiny folding chairs. The space between the rows made airline seating seem generous. I was in the back of the crowd as we surged into the room, so by the time I made it in, only a few seats were left. I spotted a chair on the aisle, but to sit down, I had to scoot the chair back a little, right into the shins of the man in the row behind. I recognized him: it was Rich Trumka.

Rich and I met for the first time that day. At that time he was the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, although a few months later he would replace John Sweeney as the new president of the eight-million-member union. Rich had started out in the mines, and he was built like a Mack Truck, solid and radiating a barely contained energy.

As I sat down, I turned around and said with a tentative laugh, “You’re not going to kick the back of my chair, are you, Mr. Trumka?”

Rich leaned forward and said, “Nah. Sit down. I’ve got your back, Elizabeth. I’ll always have your back.”

Before the president came out, copies of a white paper prepared by the Treasury Department were passed around. Various proposals for financial reform had been percolating in Congress for a few months, but everyone was waiting to see what the White House would do. This was the administration’s opening shot in the battle for reform.

Sure, the president had talked about toasters on television, but it worried me that the banking industry had so much access to the White House. I knew that senior White House staffers had been holding meetings with the CEOs and lobbyists from Citibank, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and other giant banks, and I had no clue about what had been promised in those meetings.

The press was reporting that the agency was somewhere on the White House’s wish list, but I needed to see for myself what that really meant. Would the White House propose a strong consumer agency with real teeth? Or would it float the notion of some empty advisory thing or maybe some minor initiative that could easily be bargained away? Would the agency be “another possible idea” in a long string of “possible ideas,” or would it get a “we’ve got to have this” push?