-She talked about student debt.
She talked about, you know, mortgages.
She talked about all kinds of economic issues
pertaining to working families.
She talked about bankruptcy.
-In 2011, in a living room in Boston,
Elizabeth Warren was thinking about running for the US Senate.
Joyce Linehan remembers it well.
-It was incredible, you know?
My friends, there were some --
So, people in the room would have been social workers,
artists, teachers, you know, neighborhood activists,
so there was a pretty good, you know,
range of people in there,
and they were all really, really taken with her.
You know, I can't say there weren't tears,
but everybody to a person, as they walked out there door,
said, you know, "If she's in, I'm in."
-At one house party in Andover, someone was recording.
-There is nobody in this country
who got rich on his own -- nobody.
You built a factory out there, good for you,
but I want to be clear -- You moved your goods to market
on the roads the rest of us paid for.
You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.
You were safe in your factory because of police forces
and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.
-It was speech that went viral and got people talking.
-Will new taxes on the rich solve anything.
What do you make of Elizabeth Warren's comments
that everybody who succeeded in doing anything
in the United States of America
has been successful because of the government?
-I think it's the best advertisement I've seen
in a long time
for limiting the size and scope of government.
It's terrifying.
-Elizabeth Warren had never run for office,
but did have a knack for explaining things,
as a Harvard Law School professor.
-No one seems to particularly like many law school professors.
You know, they're not warm and cuddly types,
but there was a joy in what she did, and that joy translates.
She had to be persuaded to run.
She saw herself as, you know, sort of a classic progressive
appointed policy maker,
even though she had earned her political chops
and knew how to wheel and deal behind the scenes
along with the best of them,
but she did not think she was destined for electoral office.
-Before she was a political candidate,
Warren was a consumer advocate.
She had spent years studying why people go bankrupt.
Collecting data from courts
across the United States, she found...
-That about 90% of all bankruptcies result
from one of three factors --
unexpected medical bills, unemployment, and divorce.
And so she actually became kind of an advocate
for vulnerable people in America who,
due to circumstances most often beyond their control,
ended up in extreme financial distress.
-Dennis Kelleher is president of Better Markets,
a non-partisan group promoting financial reform.
He has known Elizabeth Warren for more than 20 years.
-People may not know the details
of what she did or what her policies are,
but the one thing you can be sure of
is that Liz Warren has been fighting her entire life
for the little guy and the little gal.
-Building a credit card is more profitable
than building any other kind of consumer lending,
and within that, the revenues are coming seven dollars to one
for building in interest rates and late fees,
where you can snag customers
whenever they slip and fall at all.
It's about tricks and traps.
-We don't have the time to go into that.
Thank you. -When markets melted down
in 2008 and banks needed a bail-out,
Warren was picked to chair a congressional panel,
watching how taxpayer money got spent.
-Good morning, Mr Secretary.
We appreciate your returning here to testify.
Time is running out to make certain
that we have used this money
to assure the stability of our financial system.
Time is also running out to make certain that TARP money
is used to help families and small businesses
the way it was so quickly used to help Wall Street.
-As Congress passed new financial regulations,
Warren had an idea for a new government agency,
an agency that would help enforce those regulations.
-Good afternoon, everybody.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
will be a watchdog for the American consumer,
charged with enforcing
the toughest financial protections in history.
Now, getting this agency off the ground
will be an enormously important task -- a task that can't wait.
And that task is something that I've asked Elizabeth to take on.
We are extremely proud of you, Elizabeth.
Good luck. -Thank you, Mr President.
-But Warren never got to lead that new agency.
President Obama named someone else over worries
Republicans would block her confirmation.
-She deserved it. It was her -- It was her idea.
It was her passion, her commitment.
She was the logical and obvious choice.
Sheila Bair is a Republican and former chair
of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
She first met Elizabeth Warren
as part of an advisory committee on consumer issues.
-This idea that she wants government control of everything
and is going to put everybody in jail and blow everything up --
that's just not who she is.
She wants accountability.
-The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
or CFPB, opened for business in 2011.
-Within its first five years or so,
it actually recovered more than $12 billion for over 25 million
ripped off Americans from financial institutions.
-Back in Boston, Elizabeth Warren
went from battling the big banks to being on the ballot.
In 2012, she became
the first female senator from Massachusetts.
-This victory belongs to you.
You did this.
You did this. You did this.
-Warren has been the primary sponsor of seven bills
that became law, legislation that includes protections
for veterans and their finances and privacy rules for people
who are the subject of genetic research.
Seven years into her political career, at age 70,
she's now running for president.
It is a campaign built around specific policy proposals
to restructure how government works and who it works for.
-And I got a plan. Yeah, yeah.
I've got a plan for that.
-She's just so whip-smart, you know.
It comes naturally to her.
And so, you know, I don't agree with all of her policies,
but I trust that she's thought them out well,
that they're well intended,
and focused on the right problem,
which is the public and the middle class, in particular.
-But critics say her plans are unworkable,
and in this political climate,
they would not get far in Congress.
-Getting anything done legislatively as long
as the Republicans control the Senate is an impossibility.
So, you have to look at Elizabeth Warren's
great array of policies
as a roadmap to how she would use the administrative state
to reshape the political and economic realities
of the United States.
-The Democratic candidates debate.
-Warren faces another challenge --
a crowded field of Democratic candidates,
including one named Bernie Sanders.
-I want to say thank you to Bernie.
-Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders
share the same ideological space.
Their message is very similar to voters.
It's the idea that the system is rigged.
Should the two of them stay in the race,
they could end up splitting the vote
and support on the far left of the party,
and that gives a moderate a real good shot
to, you know, catapult to the nomination.
-Just three things, three structural changes.
We're gonna fight back against the corruption.
-In her run for the presidency, Warren is using the same skills
Joyce Linehan saw back in that living room in Boston in 2011.
Each campaign stop is a classroom.
-That was her magic power -- her ability to tell the story
about how the economic system
is not working for people, not like they didn't know.
They knew they could feel it,
but she could explain why it was happening
and what we could possibly work on to undo that.
So, I think teacher is really the thing that sets her apart
from a lot of other politicians I've seen over the years.
-Today, a full-time minimum wage job in America
will not keep a momma and a baby out of poverty.
That is wrong, and that is why I am in this fight!
-Let's win! -Warren!
Warren! Warren!
Warren!
Warren! Warren!
Warren!