A Fighting Chance

The Memorial Day recess was coming up. The Republicans upped the ante: not only were they refusing to confirm a director, they intended to prevent the president from having any opportunity to make a recess appointment. How? They would go on vacation as they always did, but they would use a parliamentary trick to keep the Senate officially in session so they could claim it wasn’t a recess. The press immediately declared that this was another move to keep me from becoming the head of the consumer agency.

Once again, the agency and the question of who would become its director had become the center of a gale-force storm. Calls from the media came in every day. Reporters tried to stop me on the street. Friends telephoned from all over the country. I got encouraging e-mails and atta-girl messages left on our home phone. I couldn’t get my hair cut without people stopping by to tell me to hang in there. Otis faced repeated interruptions of his late-night walks when people stopped to ask about the agency and promise their support.

In the midst of all the hubbub, I got a letter that stood out from all the others. Handwritten on congressional stationery, it looked a little like a thank-you note for a wedding gift. Ever polite—I guess that for him it still wasn’t personal—Chairman Spencer Bachus wanted to let me know that he wouldn’t support me or, for that matter, George Washington himself to be head of the consumer agency.

Deal … or No Deal

In June, the president called me in to talk about the agency and the question of who would run it. This was our first one-on-one meeting since he’d asked me to take the interim job almost a year earlier.

He left no room for ambiguity: I wasn’t going to get the nomination.

I was disappointed, but not surprised. The president had never promised to nominate me. In fact, it was pretty clear from the beginning that he wasn’t itching to give me the post. He hadn’t nominated me a year earlier, he hadn’t given me a recess appointment during the past several months while I’d been doing the job, and his advisors had consistently told me not to get my hopes up.

The president then explained that he planned to make a deal with those who opposed me: He would agree not to nominate me, and in return he would get the Republicans to stop the filibuster threats and allow a vote for the nominee.

I pressed the president: Was he sure he could lock in this deal? Along with everyone else, I had read the letter from the Republicans, and it sounded like they were in no mood for compromise.

The president told me not to worry; he was pretty confident they could work out the deal. They just needed a nominee who wasn’t me.

If I couldn’t do it, I thought that Rich Cordray should be the president’s nominee. Rich, who had done a great job putting together the CFPB enforcement team, has both nerve and skill, exactly what would be needed to lead the new agency. The president was on board with Rich.

The White House plan was based on the premise that I was radioactive, but someone else could get through the Senate. If that was correct, then I felt like I knew an inside joke: any tough director would cause the bad guys a mess of trouble—and Rich is as tough as they come. The Republicans and the banks had succeeded in their effort to push me out the door, but I knew that Rich would work his tail off to make this agency a fighting force for working people.

On July 18, 2011, I stood beside the president in the Rose Garden while he announced his nomination of Rich Cordray as director of the CFPB.

But the decision to choose Rich changed nothing. Within hours of learning about the Cordray nomination, the Republicans declared that his candidacy for director of the agency was “dead on arrival.”

Oh. It turned out there was no deal after all.





The Last Meeting

Bruce and I gave up the apartment, and Otis gave up the much-loved elevator. We gave away our furniture to young CFPB staffers and packed up the car with our personal stuff. There were good-bye parties that nearly tore my heart out. I’d asked so many of these people to come work for the consumer agency, and they had put every fiber of their being into giving the agency the best possible start. I wanted to stay and fight alongside them. But I needed to suck it up and move on. My time was over.

On my last day at the agency, I went to the White House to hand my letter of resignation to the president in person. Once again, he took me outside. Once again, it was hot. But this time, the conversation was different.

We talked about the foreclosure disaster and the millions of families still in trouble. We talked about the increasing stress on the middle class. And we talked about the future—about where the country was headed, about a growing band of Republican extremists.

Eventually we got around to the big Senate race that was brewing in Massachusetts. He talked about the Senate and how, if I ran and beat Scott Brown, I’d have a lot of opportunities to fight for the economic issues I cared about.

The president said he liked Rich Cordray, and he thought he would be a good leader for the consumer agency. I agreed that Rich would be terrific.

I thanked him for the chance to serve, and I left.





A Victory