Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren is a woman on the front line — not just in the War against Women, but leading the defense against the Republicans’ attack on the middle class. “I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters, people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them — not one — stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes,” she said last night at the Democratic National Convention.
Obama gave Warren more voice in portraying the middle-class problem than he gave to any other public intellectual or policymaker besides his White House economic team. That’s because she has been fighting for the middle class for years. Warren chaired a congressional panel overseeing the $787 billion financial bailout of 2009, and she drew up plans in the Dodd-Frank Act for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which her right-hand enforcement man now runs.
Warren has long contested the Republicans’ argument that the middle class suffers from excessive consumerism. “Middle-class families are [not] rushing headlong into financial ruin because they are squandering too much money on Red Lobster, Gucci, and trips to the Bahamas,” Warren wrote in 2003 in The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. She’s the perfect candidate now to rally the Obama Democrats against the Romney/Ryan run for economic policies that will only increase inequality.
Professor Ruth O’Brien, who earned her Ph.D. in political science at UCLA, joined the Graduate Center’s doctoral faculty in 1997 and, in 2004, founded the “Writing Politics” specialization in political science. She also serves as an adjunct affiliated scholar with the Center for American Progress. In her research and books, she focuses on American politics, law, political theory without national borders, globalism, and American/global dichotomy. She edits the award-winning “Public Square” series for Princeton University Press, showcasing public intellectuals such as Jill Lepore, Jeff Madrick, Anne Norton, Martha Nussbaum, and Joan Scott. O’Brien is also launching “Heretical Thought,” an Oxford University Press political-theory series that is global in outlook. Her latest book, Out of Many One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition (2013), with a foreword by journalist Thomas Byrnes Edsall, distinguished professor at Columbia’s School of Journalism, was honored with a 2013 “Author Meets Critic” American Political Science Association convention session. She also wrote Bodies in Revolt: Gender, Disability, and a Workplace Ethic of Care (2005), Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (2001), which received an honorable mention from Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry (“Meyers Center”), and Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of the New Deal Labor Policy, 1886–1935 (1998). “Writing Politics” emanated from two books she contributed to and edited: Telling Stories out of Court: Narratives about Women and Workplace Discrimination (2008) and Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (2004), which earned another honorable mention from the Meyers Center. O’Brien’s controversial blog led Rush Limbaugh to dub her a “professorette.”
