One of the big questions out there is who Barack Obama will appoint to appoint to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The leading candidate has always been Elizabeth Warren, who literally wrote the book on predatory finance in the age of the mega-banks, but the mega-banks, along with Tim Geithner, just don’t like her, because, she might actually, you know, protect consumers.
That being said, the democratic wing of the Democratic Party has rallied behind her to an astonishing degree, and so it has increasingly appeared that Obama will nominate her, if only to allow the nomination to be filibustered, as they did in the case of his nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen.
Given just how demoralized the party base is, politics demands it.
Nothing has been announced yet though, so the press is engaging in a process similar to Kremlinology, and we have another data point: Ms. Warren has pulled out of the contract law class that she was teaching at Harvard.
I still expect that if Obama nominates Warren, he won’t fight for her, but it is beginning to look like he will nominate her.