President Barack Obama, accompanied by Elizabeth Warren, announces that Warren will head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Friday, Sept. 17, 2010, during an event in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. | AP Photo

President Obama called Elizabeth Warren 'one of our country’s fiercest advocates for the middle class' on Friday.

Obama taps Warren for watchdog job


“I think the President is trying to send a signal to supporters on the left saying, ‘Hey, I’m still with you,’” said James Gattuso, a senior research fellow at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. “At the same time he doesn’t want to send a message to the financial community that says ‘I’m at war with you.’”

Some liberals had hoped that Obama would do just that.

If the president had unequivocally nominated Warren as chair of the CPFB, they argue, it would have been a bold statement that he stands with consumers and the middle class against Wall Street. They say the President still has time to nominate a permanent leader for the agency once the setup is complete, and they are holding out hope that he will ultimately choose Warren.

“It’s still completely on the table that she’d be given a permanent appointment,” Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told CNN on Friday. “If the Wall Street types in the White House tried to stab her in the back and give someone else that role, there’d be hell to pay with progressives.”’s Chaudhary, however, said job one for Warren and the White House is to ensure “that this agency gets up and running well, that it’s set up correctly and it’s set up quickly.” By the time Obama has to select a full-time director, she said, it’s likely that “most Americans [will] think that she is the right person for the job.”

Republican had held their cards close for most of the summer, but their chorus against Warren grew stronger as it became clear the White House was considering her.

According to a spokesperson for Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the Banking Committee’s ranking Republican, he would only support a nominee “who has demonstrated a strong appreciation for the necessary balance between consumer protection and safety and soundness.”

But others cited Warren’s overwhelmingly positive, bipartisan job approval ratings, based on her performance running the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the watchdog group for the controversial bank “bailout” program. And her supporters cite her experience there as evidence that she could hold her own in confirmation hearings.

“I will even say that despite some of my misgivings with her, she’s been very aggressive and about trying to protect the taxpayer in the way that TARP has been run,” said Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the libertarian think-tank, the Cato Institute.

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