Wife, mother, and grandmother, a teacher, advocate, and senator, Elizabeth Warren has adopted all of these labels and more over the years, as documented in her autobiography A Fighting Chance. At times funny, and at others somber, A Fighting Chance tells Warren’s story against a backdrop of current events and a heavy dose of economic policy. Revolving largely around the development of her political philosophy and including an in-depth explanation of some of her more controversial decisions, the book follows Warren from childhood until present. Behind a not-so-subtle layer of political advocacy are witty little jibes, side notes, and analogies that make the denser sections more bearable: a running joke about always getting lost, a deep, abiding love for her three successive dogs, and funny metaphors, comparing things like faulty toasters to mortgages. Though it occasionally reads as like policy paper rather than a personal reflection, A Fighting Chance takes the reader into the nitty-gritty of our nation’s most controversial financial decisions with a depth of insight and experience no one else in today’s politics can offer.
“Setting the Kitchen on Fire”
The most remarkable thing about Warren’s story isn’t her political acumen, teaching career, or the truly unbelievable number of times she’s packed up and moved, but rather the sheer amount of societal change she’s navigated along the way. Born in Oklahoma in 1949, Warren is the daughter of a small-town maintenance man and a Sears telephone operator. She grew up in all the financial difficulties and social repression of the 1950s. It’s striking how different the America of Warren’s youth is from the one she now serves as senator. For one thing, gender and societal roles were much firmer: when she first expressed an interest in going to college she was told not to do so. Or, as she puts it, “It was harder for a woman with a college education to find a husband.” Indeed, 11 years, four cities, two children, and one law degree later, when her first marriage was crumbling around her, Warren explains that she “failed” her husband and social expectations. “I was supposed to be the Betty Crocker award winner,” she remembers, “but I set things on fire.”
As a single, working mother of two, Warren had no choice but to push on. Eventually, things worked out: in her moment of crisis, her family rallied around her, her parents and aunt moving in to lend a hand. Time passed and life stabilized: her kids grew up, she continued to teach, and eventually married again. Her academic career moved her to the University of Pennsylvania, and then to Harvard. Throughout all of this, however, Warren’s political interest steadily grew, and her concerns about financial justice and accountability eventually led her to the national political stage.
Dr. Warren Goes to Washington
“The Bankruptcy Wars,” as Warren dubs them, started when she realized that no one, especially not the experts, could answer the question, “Why do people go bankrupt?” Initially, she admits to sharing many people’s views that those who declared bankruptcy were “cheaters and lazy slugs who wanted the easy way out.” It was only after she started her own research that she realized that most people went bankrupt because of unpredictable factors: losing a job or getting sick at the same time as a mortgage spiked. Her research on bankruptcy and increasing political activism dominated years of her life and, consequently, a sizable amount of her autobiography.
The balance between Warren’s story and policy for the masses becomes a little skewed, especially as her work takes her to the nation’s capital. After years of fighting big banks on bankruptcy law from the perspective of a “policy wonk,” Warren grudgingly acknowledged that real change usually involves working within government. When offered the chance to head an oversight committee on the 2008 financial bailout, she jumped at the opportunity. As with the autobiographies of most controversial political figures, Warren’s arguments seem far more reasonable and far less radical than media coverage at the time made them out to be. In the almost one hundred pages that Warren spends on this next battle in her quickly blossoming political career, she tells the stories of people like Mr. Estrada, a home owner and father of two who did not fully understand the bank’s offer for a better mortgage, and as a result, lost his house. However, she also lingers on the inadequacies of the system: a financial industry with incredible influence on Washington, a Congress too partisan to focus on the real issues, and the pervasive old boys’ club mentality common in politics and finance alike.
As sympathetic as we might be to Warren’s plights, A Fighting Chance falls more than once into the trap of political cliché. In her work with the Treasury oversight committee, Warren paints herself as a small-town girl who practically single-handedly takes on the big bad bureaucracy for the sake of what’s right; there’s even an entire section of the book called “David and Goliath.” Her casual comments that “insiders don’t appreciate questions from outsiders, including pesky professors who don’t know the unwritten rules of Washington,” remind us why we’re no longer impressed by the self-given (wo)man against the world political pariah label. It’s true that Warren entered the political scene without significant connections and worked from the bottom up. At a time when just about anyone in Washington will call themselves a maverick to avoid the dreaded political insider label, it’s difficult to believe that someone can work within Congress and still claim to not understand political elites. Anyone that runs a congressional oversight committee and has meetings with President Obama is by no means an outsider.
Doing the Right Thing
Despite her involvement in many levels of American politics, Warren had managed to steer clear of actually running for office herself for years. When she writes about her own election, it’s not what might be expected. This chapter is smaller than the others, full of worries about her family, embarrassment over her more fiery comments, and the genuine—if somewhat overused—claim that her campaign was not about herself, but about making a difference for the people. The campaign was expensive, aggressive, and by no means a paragon of American democracy, but Warren’s narration offsets its more controversial aspects. In a political age of cynicism and suspicion, it’s important to remember what drives our country to be stronger, do better, and work harder. Warren’s parting comments emphasize more than any of her other claims that she’s aware of the ultimate goal of every political fight. “Equality. Opportunity. The pursuit of happiness. An America that builds something better for the next kid and the kid after that and the kid after that.” A Fighting Chance may be more policy than autobiography, but its insights into the inner workings of our policy are unrivaled. Clichés notwithstanding, in a time when our country’s greatness seems to be in crisis, this is the story of a woman who is the living embodiment of the American Dream.
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