Politics Plus

While yesterday I reported that Obama would appoint Warren, today I can follow up that he has.  Here;s a chance to get to know her a little better and see how excited Rachel Maddow was to interview her.

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WHY ELIZABETH WARREN?

Credited with coming up with the original idea for a U.S. consumer financial protection agency, Warren, 61, is not afraid of making enemies and has campaigned for years on behalf of consumers, writing books about why working families can no longer afford a middle-class lifestyle in America.

She put banks on notice on Friday, as she accepted Obama’s invitation to become a special advisor to stand up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a move by Obama that sidesteps a potentially bruising Senate confirmation.

"The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over," she cautioned in a White House blog posting.

"People ought to be able to read their credit card and mortgage contracts and know the deal. They shouldn’t learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them."

ARE ADVOCATES PLEASED?

This was music to the ears of consumer advocates, who had lobbied hard for her to get the post and were delighted that their hero was safely in place.

"Wall Street is busy trying to thwart regulators from doing the job Congress laid out — keeping the big banks in check," said Lisa Donner, Executive Director of Americans for Financial Reform. "With Elizabeth Warren leading the way, and the public keeping up its vigilance, they will not succeed."

This sentiment was echoed by other consumer groups, some of whom had mounted petitions to secure her the job.

"Warren offers the promise of what financial consumers need most – a tough advocate to clean up an industry that has made unfairness and deception its core business model," said David Arkush, Director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch Division.

WHAT DOES BIG BUSINESS SAY?

Making her an assistant to the president and special adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was sharply criticized by industry lobby groups.

"This maneuver is an affront to the pledge of transparency and consumer protection that’s purported to be the focus of this new agency, the Chamber of Commerce said in a statement.

"This may be a calculated move to help fire up some groups ahead of the mid-term elections, but it undermines the credibility and effectiveness of this already politicized new agency from day one," it said.

WALL STREET’S WORST NIGHTMARE?

The banking industry already had reservations about being regulated by an individual who has a long track record of seeing Wall Street as the problem.

The two key gripes about Warren are her perceived predisposition in viewing banks as the guilty parties, and an academic’s lack of real-world experience of how the industry functions, and hence a lack of appreciation of its views.

"She has no grounding in the practicalities of the industry that she would be regulating," said one former Federal Reserve official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"Many people in the industry believe, in her mind and in her heart, that she has been such an advocate for this that there is a predisposition in her view-point of being highly suspicious of the industry and that it is guilty until proven innocent," he said… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Reuters>

Did you notice how the chamber’s criticism was empty words without substance.  They can’t tell the truth, because they won’t admit that their objection is that the don’t want to be stopped from robbing you blind.

I’ve never seen Rachel Maddow so excited before, even more than when DADT was ruled unconstitutional.  Here she is interviewing Elizabeth Warren.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is a huge win for Main Street!

After poll after poll saying that Democrats are going to  take it in the shorts this November, here’s one that gives us an even shot.  However, one thing I learned from years in the opinion research business is that, this early, generic ballot polls are not really predictive.

Nervous Democratic incumbents in Congress received a sliver of good news Thursday from a new poll that found them tied with Republicans when people were asked which party they’d vote for in November.

However, the bipartisan Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll found that, by a 9-point margin, most voters still think that the GOP will reclaim control of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Still, when they were asked which party they’d vote for if they had to do it today, both Democrats and Republicans registered 43 percent.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who helped conduct the survey with GOP pollster Ed Goeas, said the results proved that Democratic incumbents weren’t as dead in the water as pundits thought.

Recent polls have projected a Republican tidal wave that could give the GOP more than the 39 House seats it needs to add to wrest the speaker’s gavel from Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Republicans need to gain 10 seats to take control of the Senate.

"It’s a tough battleground, but it is a battleground, still," Lake said. "It’s a tough, tough environment for both parties, and both parties are going to find some surprises in November. This electorate is relishing upsetting the status quo."

Goeas said that Republicans retained a formidable advantage because their base and angry independents appeared more motivated to vote than Democrats did… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <McClatchy DC>

The reason it doesn’t matter very much is that, especially in midterm elections, the likely voters demographic grows.  Sad as it is, most voter’s minds are on their favorite football or baseball teams, fantasies about a Hooters waitress, getting the kids back to school, finding a job, keeping their job, the latest music video, the next episode of their favorite reality TV show… everything and anything but politics.  The vast majority of Americans won’t even give the midterms serious thought until mid-October.  It’s a national shame.

Most survey savvy folks know from experience that saying that they do not intend to vote is the easy way to get out of taking the survey, and and many more say they aren’t voting to express fristration when they really will when the time comes.  So the likely voters taking the poll are the committed activists on both sides, along with lonely people who are glad the researcher called just to have someone to talk to.  They are not at all predictive of who will actually vote.

Now the danger here is this.  The lopsided results in most polls demonstrate that more of the activists on the right are engaged than of those on the left.  If the left gets busy, there is still ample time to recover.

One disparate finding was the nine point spread that people think the GOP will take the House and the Senate.  It seems contradictory that the same people split evenly on the generic ballot would yield this result, but there’s a reason.  The MSM have been saying just that, over and over again, based on the inaccurate generic ballot polls, and that’s what people are hearing.

Therefore it is very important that we encourage people get active, organize, and vote.