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FEATURE The Comeback Cop Bankers beware—credit cop Elizabeth Warren is running for Senate. Why are some embracing the sheriff of Wall Street? By Ryan Schuette B infant Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in the nation's Capitol, newly under Tea Party sway. y this time last year, pundits had all but written off Elizabeth Warren, the controversial Treasury special assistant struggling to find a foothold for the President Barack Obama in the White House Rose Garden to confirm what had until then been speculation: Warren, who had withstood public hearings and quarrels with Republican lawmakers, was out. Richard Cordray, her handpicked enforce- ment chief—whom their boss would later recess-appoint in defiance of Republican obfusca- tion—was in. And in August, the woman who aspired to police Wall Street left the halls of power in Washington, D.C., for more ivory ones at Harvard University, ostensibly to resume an academic career—and stay out of politics. Finally, in late July, she joined change. Flash-forward one year, and the bookish underdog is in the running for the Senate seat once held by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts, out-raising—and out-spending— her Republican rival, Sen. Scott Brown, whom she leads by a hair in recent polls. Experts say that her plainspoken advocacy for middle-class values makes her a darling of the left, siphoning off dollars and disaffected Obama supporters to fuel her insurgent candidacy. Just how popular is the Funny how quickly things consumer advocate? The numbers are telling. According to OpenSecrets.org, Warren has raised nearly $16 mil- lion for her war chest, nearly $4 million more than her rival, undoubtedly helping make the race for Senate in Massachusetts the second most expensive one in the nation this year. Cementing the speed of her insurgency, a Suffolk University/7NEWS poll found that Warren ran neck-and- neck with Brown at 47 percent to 48 percent in May, up nine points from a lowly 40 percent in February. Don't include the financial made his bones, notably gave $55,200 to the Brown campaign.). Warren, by contrast, counts six major universities, a few liberal advocacy groups, and several law firms among her financiers. And not one major bank. The People's Sheriff E services community in Camp Warren. If dollars were votes, then Brown would take his to the bank, with a financial lifeline in place with the likes of Goldman Sachs ($73,900); JPMorgan Chase ($60,155); Barclays ($41,999); and Bank of New York Mellon ($39,350), according to OpenSecrets.org (Bain Capital, the tarred-and- feathered firm where former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney PIRG and someone who worked for years with the candidate on reform bills, finds it easy to understand anti-Warren senti- ment in the financial services industry. "Elizabeth Warren has spent d Mierzwinski, consumer program director with U.S. her career working on behalf of consumers victimized by a financial industry where the table is tipped against them," he tells us. "The financial services industry does not want her to have a bully pulpit." Warren didn't always cut a divisive figure. For much of THE M REPORT | 29