A Fighting Chance

The document being handed out that day was eighty-nine pages long. My hands shook as I opened it. Completely missing the table of contents, I tore through the pages. Financial Services Oversight Council. Capital and Prudential Standards. National Bank Supervisor. I was getting panicky. Was there anything in here about the agency?

Finally, on page fifty-five I found the right section: Protect Consumers and Investors from Financial Abuse. Skimming, I spotted two paragraphs about what had gone wrong—got it, got it—and then I hit the magic sentence: “We propose the creation of a single regulatory agency, a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), with the authority and accountability to make sure that consumer protection regulations are written fairly and enforced vigorously.”

Bingo—the White House was in all the way!

At the time, I was too buzzed with excitement to marvel at how truly astonishing this was. I’d heard rumors that some of the president’s top financial advisors were unenthusiastic about the concept for the new agency. Besides, the administration was in the midst of the largest financial crisis in living memory, and the staff had a billion things to worry about and was overwhelmed. So where had the support come from?

Months afterward, I would find out. When push came to shove, the agency had a powerful champion on the inside. As I would later learn, he believed passionately that the White House needed to support a reform measure that would help regular people, and he saw the agency as the best way to do that.

His name was Barack Obama.

Going Door-to-Door

After the White House announced its position on financial reform, it was time for Congress to go all out. Barney Frank took the lead in the House, and later Chris Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, picked up the ball for the Senate in his role as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Together, they took on the monumental task of designing a bill and getting their colleagues behind it. It was an uphill battle: when the campaign for the reform bill began, we sure as heck didn’t have the votes in the House or the Senate. And the bank lobbyists were fighting full out.

Michael Barr, assistant secretary of the Treasury, and his top deputy, Eric Stein, directed the painstaking work of drafting the administration’s proposed language. Community advocates also stepped up in a big way: in June 2009, a number of nonprofits joined forces and set up Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), an organization whose main mission would be to fight for a range of financial reforms that would benefit regular people. AFR was launched with help from nonprofits like AFL-CIO, Consumer Federation of America, and PIRG, and eventually more than two hundred groups would join the cause.

AFR managed to scrape together some money, and they used it to hire a handful of employees, including Heather Booth as executive director and Lisa Donner as her deputy. Creating a small team to organize the overall campaign for reform was a brilliant move. Instead of each nonprofit putting a little time into fighting for this or that provision, AFR coordinated the efforts of dozens of groups, magnifying the work of each one by helping them speak with a single voice. Heather and Lisa and the rest of their crew put out press releases, coordinated briefings on Capitol Hill, and organized groups of volunteers. The staffers and lobbyists and lawyers for the megabanks outnumbered them by a zillion to one, but the AFR people were there—day in and day out—hammering on the need for financial reform. They worked their hearts out.

I was still pouring much of my time into teaching and COP, but I figured we were approaching the make-or-break moment for financial reform and the consumer agency. I offered to jump in to help however I could, and that summer, Dan Geldon offered to jump in with me. The Roosevelt Institute offered Dan a job to help develop ideas and advocate for financial reform, and Dan said yes. He quit his job at COP. Never mind that this would be his third job in eight months. Dan wasn’t in this to build a résumé that would look good to some future employer. He wanted to make a difference—right now.

Dan and I started with no long-term plan and no obvious path to victory, a two-man platoon picking up the fight wherever we could. Dan was only a year out of Harvard Law School, but he already had a passion for politics and a natural feel for Washington that I’ll never have. We met and shared research with anyone who would talk to us. We visited with nonprofits and labor leaders. I made cold calls, asking reporters if they had heard about the consumer agency, and we followed up with people who had written articles in the past. We called editorial boards and wrote op-eds, joined in conference calls and spoke at events.