Bloomberg has a profile piece out on former Ohio Attorney General, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director gubernatorial candidate, Richard Cordray (D. OH). The key focus of this piece is to see if Cordray’s economic populist message and record taking on Wall Street is the way back to victory for Democrats in the Rust Belt:
Clinton’s loss raised a host of thorny questions the party has been debating ever since: Was the problem Clinton, or is it broader than that? Should Democrats make more explicit appeals around race and gender to activate disaffected voters? Or should they embrace the full-throated economic populism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren?
Cordray’s race will offer some interesting clues—he’s as pure an exponent of Warren-style populism as anyone on this year’s ballot. Because he lacks a Trump-like persona or a desire to litigate the president’s misdeeds, Cordray is embarking on what amounts to a laboratory experiment in the power of progressive economic populism to win back lost voters. Trump showed that hard-right populism can resonate in Ohio; what’s as yet unclear is whether that message can resonate from the left, when shorn of its anti-immigrant, anti-Clinton attacks and dialed back from Trumpian bombast to Cordray’s scout-leader calm.
Recruited by Warren herself to the CFPB after a stint as Ohio’s attorney general, Cordray has turned the agency’s mission of protecting consumers from Wall Street predations into a campaign message. “My job at the CFPB, as President Obama told me when he interviewed me, was to stand on the side of people in the financial marketplace and see that they were treated fairly,” Cordray told a group of Cincinnati firefighters. “We did that—and got back $12 billion for 30 million Americans who had been cheated or mistreated by large financial institutions.” Cordray also touted his role as Ohio’s financial avenger after the 2008 crisis. “We recognized that our pension system had been abused—a pension system that supports our police, firefighters, and public servants,” he continued. “We got back $2 billion from Wall Street that never should have been taken from them and put it back into Ohio taxpayers’ pockets.”
His Robin Hood record notwithstanding, Cordray, 59, is about the furthest thing from the tub-thumping populists of yore. Tall and sandy-haired, he has a hangdog visage and the soft-spoken demeanor of the late PBS kids’ show host Mr. Rogers. “It makes me mad to see people in government serving themselves at our expense,” Cordray, sounding not the least bit mad, told a union crowd in Lima earlier that day.
While he rarely puts a charge in his audience, Cordray drove Republicans in Washington to fits, quickly emerging as Public Enemy No. 2 (behind Warren) for his aggressiveness in clawing back those billions of dollars for consumers. Conservatives viewed him as the embodiment of rapacious government overreach and made him the target of furious criticism throughout his CFPB tenure. “For conducting unlawful activities, abusing his authority, denying market participants due process, Richard Cordray should be dismissed by our president,” Jeb Hensarling, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, declared last year, as part of an unsuccessful campaign to pressure Trump to fire him.
Not only do we have a terrific opportunity to win this race, we have the ability to prove that the Warren Wing’s side of the Democratic Party is the only way to win in states like Ohio. Let’s make this win a reality. Click here to donate and get involved with Cordray’s campaign.