“Barack Obama has been one of the protest mobs’ biggest cheerleaders,” writes the campaign’s chief and right-wing political consultant Joe Wierzbicki in a release announcing a new campaign ad. ”The new poll finds that support for the violent Occupy Wall Street mobs has fallen further, and since Barack Obama has been one of the protest mobs’ biggest cheerleaders, it spells trouble for him as well.”

The mainstream media hasn’t spent much time highlighting this vulnerability for Obama, but that is where you come in. We urgently need your help to raise the money to launch our new TV ad campaign that shows how Democrat leaders shamelessly have championed the Occupy Wall Street mobs that have cost taxpayers millions of dollars and created considerable damage in cities across America.

The ad closes with a question: “Are we going to let these mobs and their Democrat champions do this to America, or are we going to fight back?”

Voters still sympathize to a significant degree with the main message of the movement, which centers on the need to address the inarguable fact of expanding inequality in the country tied to the finance industry and corporate America. Although recent polls report dipping popularity for the Occupy movement, they also report greater support for the movement than for the Tea Party, with much greater public sympathy for the movement than for Wall Street and large corporations.

Wierzbicki is a longtime pitchman for Republican Party-associated firm Russo Marsh & Rogers. Wierzbicki’s 2011 Campaign to Defeat Obama PAC shares a Willows, California, PO Box with the Our Country Deserves Better PAC and with TeaPartyExpress.org. All three organizations share the same treasurer, a Kelly Lawler, who was a former staff member at the National Republican Campaign Committee.

As the “OWS as Democratic Party-backed public menace” ads hit the airwaves, a blogger for the Economist underlined how Occupiers might pose a major political problem for Democrats.

“As long as the Occupy movement remains without acknowledged leaders who can credibly distance it from the worst behavior of its least reasonable affiliates, the movement will increasingly come to be defined by its most egregious episodes.”

The blogger points to CBS coverage from clashes in Oakland.

“You see the problem? Who watches CBS News? Older people. Older people who don’t cotton to this sort of shenanigans and who vote in droves.”

The Massachusetts Republican Party recently launched a nearly identical campaign targeting Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren as the “matriarch of mayhem.”

“Barack Obama has been one of the protest mobs’ biggest cheerleaders,” writes Campaign chief and right-wing politics public relations consultant Joe Wierzbicki in a release announcing a new campaign ad.

Wierzbicki points readers to poll data from Quinnipiac suggesting Americans now view the Occupy movement unfavorably.

The new poll finds that support for the violent Occupy Wall Street mobs has fallen further, and since Barack Obama has been one of the protest mobs’ biggest cheerleaders, it spells trouble for him as well….

The mainstream media hasn’t spent much time highlighting this vulnerability for Obama, but that is where you come in.  We urgently need your help to raise the money to launch our new TV ad campaign that shows how Democrat leaders shamelessly have championed the Occupy Wall Street mobs that have cost taxpayers millions of dollars and created considerable damage in cities across America.

Look at this picture below and see what the scene was like this week in Oakland, California.  Are we going to let these mobs and their Democrat champions do this to America, or are we going to fight back?

The language in the ads and the release is exaggerated and the facts are cherry-picked. The larger narrative strategy of the campaign also comes with some risk.

Voters may not love recent more-aggressive Occupy tactics, but they still sympathize to a significant degree with the main message of the movement, which centers on the need to address the inarguable fact of expanding inequality in the country tied to the finance industry and corporate America and the way the two dominate Washington DC.

Although it’s true recent polls report dipping popularity for the Occupy movement, they also report greater sympathy for the movement than for the Tea Party and much greater sympathy for the movement than for Wall Street and large corporations.

Wierzbicki, however, isn’t looking to provide that kind of context. He’s a longtime pitchman for Republican Party-associated firm Russo Marsh & Rogers. He helped sell George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq and wrote the memo that led conservative establishment figures to backdoor-finance the national Tea Party bus tour during the 2010 campaign season.

Wierzbicki’s 2011 Campaign to Defeat Obama PAC shares a Willows, California, PO Box address with his Our Country Deserves Better PAC and with TeaPartyExpress.org. All three organizations reportedly share the same treasurer as well, a Kelly Lawler, who was a former staff member at the National Republican Campaign Committee.

Still, as political analysts of all stripes will tell anyone who will listen, broader contexts can matter not at all in the world of campaign strategy, which is partly tied to the fact that the public doesn’t always overly concern itself with the work histories of the partisans behind most political media campaigns.

As the “OWS as Democratic Party-backed public menace” ads hit the airwaves, a blogger for the Economist underlines exactly why bad-acting Occupiers might pose a major political problem for Democrats.

“As long as the Occupy movement remains without acknowledged leaders who can credibly distance it from the worst behaviour of its least reasonable affiliates, the movement will increasingly come to be defined by its most egregious episodes.”

The blogger points to CBS coverage from clashes in Oakland.

“You see the problem? Who watches CBS News? Older people. Older people who don’t cotton to this sort of shenanigans and who vote in droves.”

The Massachusetts Republican Party recently launched a nearly identical campaign targeting Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren as the “matriarch of mayhem.”

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

“I think it’s powerfully important for this agency to be in touch with families across America in a real and sustained way, and for the agency to understand — really understand — the problems families are having with consumer credit products,” Warren said in her opening remarks. “That will be absolutely critical to its success.”

The new consumer agency, which will rewrite the rules for everyday products such as credit cards and mortgages, is a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s financial overhaul. The administration says it shows that its legislative agenda has produced real changes and hopes the agency will appeal to voters who are unmoved by changes to the complex rules governing Wall Street banks. [...]

Credit card disclosure, harassment of seniors for unverifiable debts and payday lending were among the topics discussed, said Suzanne Acker, a spokeswoman for the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio. The meeting with Warren was hosted by the coalition, Americans for Financial Reform, and Policy Matters Ohio.

Apparently, Warren did not focus her address on the current foreclosure fraud crisis — despite Ohio being one of the hardest-hit states, and its attorney general and other officials hitting hardest back at banks. Why? Perhaps because the CFPB is not staffed, and is unable to start making and enforcing rules until the summer. But if it had been ready, would it have been able to help homeowners?

The CFPB cannot unilaterally make law, of course. But it could have helped. For instance, it could have empowered independent mortgage mediators, who help homeowners and banks negotiate new payment schedules. And it could have ensured that mortgage servicers follow the preexisting guidelines for how to help homeowners in default. (In the lead-up to the foreclosure fraud scandal, servicers often pushed homeowners into foreclosure too quickly, in contravention of the rules.)

Indeed, oversight of mortgage servicers is currently patchy, to say the least. But when the CFPB is set up, it will be able to put a leash on that important, underregulated part of the industry, even if a bit belatedly.

Lawmakers say more work is needed to reform Wall Street. (Flickr: Pamhule)

Soon after Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) came to Washington in 2002, a fellow member of the House Financial Services Committee told him to pick an arcane financial issue — any issue — and to make it his pet topic. Miller chose mortgage finance. He knew little about it. Banking lobbyists peppered him with data, but he had difficulty getting much information from independent sources.

[Economy1] “I was even reduced to reading blogs,” he quipped to a crowd of bankers, community organizers, financial reform experts, hedge fund managers and government aides at the Roosevelt Institute’s conference, “Financial Reform: Will It Work? How Will We Know?” on Monday. But Miller educated himself on the topic and became a leader in pushing for stronger regulation of mortgage products. By 2008, as the financial system collapsed, all of his colleagues in Congress had joined him in reading up on everything from liar loans to naked credit-default swaps.

That period of intense interest is over following the passage of financial regulatory reform legislation this summer, Miller and others said on Monday. But that does not mean that reform is done. In fact, because political attention has flowed from Wall Street to immigration, unemployment and myriad other topics, reform is imperiled. The regulatory law gave guidelines for fixing the financial sector, but the rule-writing process has fallen to dozens of agencies and government bureaucrats currently hammering out the details. That means the real work of reform is just beginning and the country is only incrementally closer to a safer financial system.

“It has become quite clear in recent years that the servant’s servant has become the master’s master,” argued Rob Johnson, a former hedge fund manager and current director at the Roosevelt Institute. Banks, he said, which should help companies merge, access credit and grow, instead ended up leeching off of them, piling on fees and unnecessary products. Ultimately, average Americans suffered. “We do not yet have a balance between society, the real economy and the financial sector.”

A few visiting investors noted that the sector has become more concentrated — due to a number of banks failing, and the others picking up their business — and therefore more dangerous. Each one of the systemically risky banks, like Goldman Sachs, has become more systemically important and therefore more likely to receive government backing if financial troubles re-emerge. (It will take years for Washington to put capital requirements and other safeguards in place.) Moreover, the long process of rule-writing allows banks ample time and opportunity to lobby bureaucrats working on legislation.

And that rule-writing is ongoing among dozens of agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. The government is also in the process of organizing and hiring workers for the new $500 million Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And the massive legislation is drawing major lobbying interest. This campaign cycle, the American Bankers Association has pledged $13.6 million on lobbying and $2.1 million to campaigns, pushing for looser rules on banks. J.P. Morgan Chase alone has contributed nearly a million to campaigns this year.

So how will those interested in reform know if it is working in the meantime? The question posed to the gathering of 40 or so met with many answers. “[Reform] would be working if the banks were making a lot less money,” Miller argued. “The reality is for it to be successful it has to be a win-lose-win,” with markets and consumers winning, and banks losing. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that financial-sector corporate profits are near their all-time highs.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) was more optimistic. He praised the reform process, citing the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, derivatives reform and proprietary trading regulations as big wins. (Elizabeth Warren, the White House and Treasury advisor helping to build the new bureau, attended the conference but did not speak.)

Still, Merkley conceded, “There is more to do.” He noted that ratings agencies — which stamped triple-A ratings on hundreds of billions of dollars of worthless mortgage-backed products in the run-up to the recession — remained unfixed. (“They’re almost useless,” sighed Jerome Fons of Kroll Bond Ratings agency.)

Others pointed to problems with the derivatives clearinghouses, which might now be the new “too big to fail” institutions. (If banks post insufficient capital to cover their derivatives trades, and another credit crunch hits Wall Street, with investors pulling cash out, the government might be forced to bail them out to calm the markets.) Some criticized the new Treasury Department Office of Financial Research, tasked with understanding Wall Street’s new innovations. Dozens of such niche issues arose.

“There are the tools there to do this,” Mike Konczal, a Roosevelt fellow, said. “Now it’s an issue of political will. [The financial regulatory law] doesn’t presuppose that [reform] will happen. But it does have the tools to do it.”

He concluded: “Those tools sit there, and there’s going to be a lot of pressure not to use them.”

In the past, Warren has lambasted banks for purposefully creating opaque, obscure products to make a buck off of customers. (Her infamous phrase for some financial products? “Tricks and traps.”) But this time, in one of her first official appearances as a member of the administration, she took a conciliatory tone.

She continued to use the folksy cant she has picked up in the last few weeks. “My first public meeting after [my current] appointment was with bankers — bankers from Oklahoma, where I grew up, where my grandmother drove a wagon in the land rush, and where I learned to sing Boomer Sooner before I learned Old MacDonald,” she said to open her remarks. (Did she always talk like this?)

Then, the tone went conciliatory. “We are not working on the theory that all the men and all the women connected with finance, either as workers or investors, are to be regarded as guilty of some undefined crime,” she said, according to prepared remarks. “On the contrary, we hold that business based on good will should be encouraged.”

Warren pressed for a principles-based, rather than rules-based approach — describing questions like “Can a customer easily understand what this product does?” as more important than “Should we ban companies from selling redundant insurance for certain title problems?”

Nevertheless, the old attitude did shine through. “[C]redit agreements have gotten long and complicated. In fact, there’s a new epithet: fine print. I understand that some of you call it ‘mice type.’ Where I come from, nobody calls fine print, hidden fees and surprise penalties ‘negotiated contract terms’ or ‘innovations.’”

She continued: “On a polite day, my brothers in Oklahoma call that kind of stuff ‘garbage.’ They don’t care if it is there because regulators required it, because the companies’ lawyers were trying to ward off lawsuits, or because it was a good place to hide another new fee. They simply see a world in which the financial institutions they do business with are not on their side. Every surprise hidden in the fine print is a bad surprise.

“Instead of seeing banks as their friends — as I did when I put my babysitting money in a savings account at Penn Square National Bank so my brothers didn’t borrow it out of my sock drawer — too many Americans see dealing with banks like handling snakes — do it long enough and you’ll get bit.”

And there it is: conciliatory but wary, soft enough to charm banks and stringent enough to please the progressives that fought to make sure Warren had the role.

“Fine print obscures the cost of credit and makes it impossible for families to compare products. Too often, families come to understand the legalese only when they get bitten by it,” Warren said. ”Streamlined disclosure can level the playing field and give families better tools to make better choices. This is particularly true in the mortgage market, where borrowers receive stacks of incomprehensible paperwork when they’re looking for a loan.”

Under Warren, the CFPB will combine and clarify two overlapping laws — the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) of 1968 and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) of 1974 — so that loan applicants get just one document of easy-to-understand fine print from lenders. It’s a small-bore change in laws, but one that could have a huge impact on consumers — just what progressive activists wanted Warren in place to ensure and enforce.

Many progressives had pushed for Warren to become the head of the CFPA. But Obama skirted a Congressional confirmation fight by naming her a special adviser instead. Inevitably, that is coming with its own problems. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is questioning whether it is right for Obama to grant Warren the job, designed to skirt a legislative check on executive power. Here’s a press release he and Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) just sent out:

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) and the Ranking Member of the Financial Services Committee Spencer Bachus (R-AL) today sent a letter to White House Counsel Robert Bauer raising questions surrounding the “unusual arrangement” surrounding President Obama’s recent decision to name Elizabeth Warren as Assistant President and Special Advisory to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP).

“In making this appointment, the President bypassed the Senate confirmation process. Furthermore, by giving Professor Warren responsibilities at both the White House and the Treasury Department, he is undermining Congressional oversight while giving her substantive authority over the CFPB.  This is unprecedented,” Issa and Bachus wrote. “Since the CFPB is ‘arguably the most significant new financial industry regulator since the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission was created in 1974,’ Congressional oversight is essential and required. If Professor Warren is not required to testify before Congress and is able to use claims of executive privilege to prevent disclosure of information relating to CFPB operations and its documents, Congress will not be able to perform its proper oversight function.  This is particularly troubling in light of the Administration’s decision to set a ‘transfer date’ of July 21, 2011 for formally standing up the CFPB.  For the next ten months, it appears the CFPB will exist in a murky status that seems designed to obstruct Congressional and public scrutiny of its operations.”

Issa and Bachus conclude, “To better understand how Professor Warren’s appointment will accommodate the need for legitimate oversight of the CFPB, we ask that you disclose her specific responsibilities and supervisory authority, which agency will pay her salary, and where she will file her mandatory financial disclosure statement. We also ask that the White House pledge to make Professor Warren available for testimony before all relevant Congressional committees.”

Obama did not explain any of the technicalities of Warren’s position in his remarks. Earlier this morning, Warren wrote a blog post saying that she accepts the position on the White House blog.

Elizabeth Warren will help set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Flickr/david_shankbone)

This morning, President Barack Obama plans to officially announce that Elizabeth Warren — Harvard Law professor and the current head of the Congressional Oversight Panel over the Troubled Asset Relief Program — will head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

[Congress1] Well, sort of. After months of will-he-or-won’t-he speculation by journalists, bankers, lobbyists  and consumer-protection advocates, this week, it leaked that Obama plans to name Warren to an advisory role helping the administration build the new agency, the much-touted agency created in the financial-regulation reform law to protect the everyday purchasers of small financial products. Today, Obama plans to confirm the leak. Warren will not, as progressives wanted, lead the bureau. She will instead act as its midwife or architect, helping to set it up before perhaps staying to run it or perhaps leaving that work to someone else.

This decision, first reported by Jake Tapper of ABC News on Wednesday night, lead not to applause from the left and condemnation from the right, as expected — but to a kind of collective “huh?” Within 24 hours of the leak, various heavyweights in the financial and political press had declared the appointment: “creative,” “strange,” “confusing,” “curious,” “made-up,” “incomplete” and “tenuous.”

Even the key senators who crafted the CFPB reacted with baffled surprise. On Thursday, Talking Points Memo tracked them down and asked them whether they had any idea what the appointment meant. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) responded, simply, “No.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said, “The answer is no. And that is not insignificant.” And Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) responded, “We ought to see. It appears to me that exactly the things that many of us thought were going to happen have happened. We’ll see. Maybe there are some details here that we’re missing” — really, a long-winded way of saying “no.”

Consensus became that the news leaked prematurely, before the White House had time to set out a standard description of the position and before it had time to update members on the Hill about the news. The title, for instance, seemed like a bureaucratic parody, an appellation designed to confuse. Rather than becoming CFPB administrator, a straightforward name for a straightforward job, Warren will be “Assistant to the President and Special Assistant to the Treasury Secretary on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” (putative acronym: APSASTCFPB). What responsibilities does that job hold? Will Warren really be calling the shots?

As of now, no one seems to know. Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic openly admitted he had little idea what to make of it: “Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what’s about to happen — and whether those of us who like Warren for the job should be happy.” (He later reported that the job seemed to have real heft.)

The Wall Street Journal authoritatively laid out a job description: “Ms. Warren’s powers will be broad, despite her unusual title. She will recruit staff for the agency, set the policy mission and serve as the recognizable public face for a new agency the administration wants to promote,” one story said.

But the paper also ran an article called “Sidelining Liz,” arguing that she will hardly have the import once presumed, and arguing, “[This] might be good politics, but it isn’t good leadership by the Obama administration. The president who lobbied so hard for financial reform seems to be weaseling when it comes to implementing it.”

And how did the base react? Most organizations that had lobbied hard for Warren seemed understanding of the decision this week. MoveOn, for instance, got behind the Warren appointment immediately.

But other groups offered a little skepticism. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, for instance, gave only golf claps. “This news shows that consumers have momentum and are on the verge of winning,” Stephanie Taylor, its cofounder, said in a statement. “If Elizabeth Warren is given full power to run the new consumer protection bureau and hold Wall Street accountable, it will mean real change — and voters will know that going into November’s election. If this appointment is window dressing and Tim Geithner controls the show, it would be a big disappointment and a victory for Wall Street.”

So why did Obama do it — naming Warren to a confusing new role, rather than the one that seemed her inheritance, given that the idea for the CFPB is hers? Why not make her the CFPB’s J. Edgar Hoover, as many hoped and presumed? The answer is the Senate confirmation process. This year, the upper chamber has delayed the confirmation of even non-controversial nominees. If the ambassador to Bulgaria has a 13-month wait to get her position, Warren — whose confirmation was a fight that Republicans wanted to pick — might have been held up for eons before ultimately not being confirmed.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), one of the authors of the Dodd-Frank law, said yesterday that Warren did not want to go through that process. “She always said she didn’t want to be there as a permanent director. Some of the liberals are worried about it. It’s almost an insult to Elizabeth. She wouldn’t take this if there was the slightest impediment to her doing the job.”

Today, the administration has its first major chance to clear the air. Already, this morning, Warren has put up a post on the White House blog making the decision sound crystal clear and, frankly, sensible. “Over the past several weeks, the President and I have had extensive conversations about the vital importance of consumer financial protection,” she writes. “The President asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has also asked me to take on the job to get the new CFPB started — right now. The President and I are committed to the same vision on CFPB, and I am confident that I will have the tools I need to get the job done.“

That leaves just one big question: Will she stay to run it? You might already have guessed the answer: Nobody really knows.

Obama chose not to nominate Warren to head the CFPB — her idea in the first place — due to the risks of the Senate confirmation process. A single Republican Senator could have held her nomination up for months. Worse, she might not have been confirmed, leaving the consumer agency without a head after weeks of waiting. From the ABC News story:

The president [last week called] Warren “a dear friend of mine.  She’s somebody I’ve known since I was in law school.  And I have been in conversations with her. She is a tremendous advocate for this idea. It’s only been a couple of months, and this is a big task standing up this entire agency, so I’ll have an announcement soon about how we’re going to move forward.”

Naming Warren as an assistant or counselor to both the president and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner would allow the president to bypass a Senate confirmation process that could prove lengthy and contentious.

“I’m concerned about all Senate confirmations these days” including if he were to “nominate somebody for dog catcher,” the president said Friday when asked if he was concerned about Warren’s ability to be confirmed. “I’ve got people who have been waiting for six months to get confirmed who nobody has an official objection to and who were voted out of committee unanimously, and I can’t get a vote on them.”

This announcement might prove disappointing to progressives who advocated for Warren. The Harvard Law professor, currently the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel over the Troubled Asset Relief Program, is considered a pioneer in the field of consumer financial protection. And a broad range of Washington politicos, as well as academics, consumer advocates and policymakers, wanted her as the head of CFPB.

Most importantly: I worry this says something very troubling about Washington. The confirmation process is broken, with the Senate routinely holding up even noncontroversial appointments and therefore depriving the government of important policymakers.  Thus, Obama chose to bypass the confirmation process. It is not good that the process is not working. And it is not good that the White House is looking to avoid a Congressional check on executive power because that process is not working.

Update: The Huffington Post has more, and reports that Warren will be able to start working on creating the CFPB immediately as well as that Obama might appoint her as its head sometime in the future.

The White House has tapped Elizabeth Warren as a special adviser to help set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, ABC News is reporting. The move allows her to act as an interim head of the CFPB and will enable her to begin setting up the agency immediately and prevent the GOP from filibustering her nomination. Warren could serve until Obama nominates a permanent director — a nomination he’s not required to make for some time. Obama could also nominate her as the permanent director in the near future, a prospect that has been discussed among top aides, according to a person familiar with the White House deliberations. Warren will also be named as a special adviser directly to Obama, ABC reported.

Update: Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) is the first Senator out to praise Warren, but to argue she should have a permanent position.

There isn’t a candidate more fit to get the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency up and running than Elizabeth Warren.  She has been a tireless advocate for financial fairness for working families and was the driving force behind the creation of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

While this is good news for American families, it is my hope that President Obama will nominate Warren to a permanent position to head up the CFPB.  She is more than deserving of the job and the Senate should have the opportunity to confirm one of the nation’s strongest consumer advocates.

The CFPB has been tasked by Congress with reining in the abuses by payday loan firms, credit card companies and predatory mortgage lenders that have stripped families of their hard-earned wealth and were a key cause of the recent financial crisis and recession.  Clearly, the new bureau has a big job to do, and Elizabeth Warren is the right person to do it.  She will put the interests of ordinary Americans first and ensure that our nation’s financial products are safe for working families and small businesses.

[T]he GOP has been willing to filibuster even seemingly popular proposals. But, after surveying a dozen insiders over the last few days — congressional aides, industry officials, progressive activists, and a few administration officials — I’ve concluded that the odds are good that Warren would be confirmed if nominated by the White House. (The White House itself agrees — it is ”confident she is confirmable,” according to a spokeperson.)

Most telling is the basic Senate math. According to two senior Senate aides — one whose boss favors Warren and the other whose boss would prefer an alternative — pretty much every Senate Democrat (and Independent) would find it agonizingly difficult to join a filibuster of Warren’s nomination, which would mean opposing an outspoken consumer advocate at a time of deep anti-Wall Street sentiment. Simply put: hoping the president will choose another candidate — something that describes several Senate Democrats — isn’t the same as opposing his eventual nominee.

Scheiber notes that an aide for Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a possible crossover, seemed to smile on Warren, without confirming or denying the Senator’s support for her: The aide says he has “worked well with Ms. Warren in her current oversight and he appreciates that she hasn’t been a rubber stamp for the administration and the fact that she’s kept the Treasury Department’s feet to the fire.” And Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) has also signaled her approval of Warren in the past.