Elizabeth Warren Isn't Always Very Nice to Democrats

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Elizabeth Warren gets The New Yorker treatment this week with a profile by legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin, and though it hits many by-now familiar points, from her upbringing to her viral internet fame to her Native American controversy, what we found most interesting were the instances that showed Warren defiantly at odds with some big names in her own party. Toobin takes care to demonstrate several instances where she’s harshly rebuked some prominent folks on her side of the aisle. Take this passage for example, which Toobin pulls from Warren’s book, where the candidate describes her opposition to a bankruptcy law reform bill that was written to benefit, as she writes it, the financial industry. Toobin writes:

In “Two Income Trap,” a book she co-wrote with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi, Warren describes briefing Hillary Clinton, when she was first lady, about the bankruptcy bill backed by the financial industry. “It’s our job to stop that awful bill,” Warren quotes Clinton as saying. But several years later, when the bill came up for passage, Senator Clinton voted for it. “The bill was essentially the same but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not,” Warren wrote. As senator, “she could not afford such a principaled position…” When the bill finally passed, in 2005, then-Senator Joseph Biden was one of its biggest backers. “Senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening,” Warren said.

Those two, Biden and Clinton, have obviously gone on to some prominent places in the Obama administration in the years since she wrote that.

The profile is a long (it is the New Yorker) but worthwhile read if you have a subscription. (Alas, it’s behind a paywall.) Reading Toobin’s depiction, remember that popular as she is with party operatives and donors who have pegged their hopes on her, she’s got some operational differences with party leaders. (And she’ll face the same kinds of pressures to raise funds that Biden and Clinton faced in the Senate.) If she and Obama manage to make it (or remain) in Washington, it’ll be fascinating to see that play out.