As many longterm TPM Readers know, Elizabeth Warren has a history with this site. Soon after TPM had raised a lot of ruckus over President Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in late 2004 and early 2005, Warren and her law students approached me about setting a short term blog to advocate against the bankruptcy bill then moving through Congress. That led to the creation of the TPM Bankruptcy Bill Blog, which launched on March 6th 2005. A few months later when we launched TPMCafe we made it a standing proposition as Warren Reports, which ran from 2005 to 2008 when Warren was preparing to enter the Obama administration.
We’re going to be republishing all of Warren’s posts since they are newly relevant as she moves into front runner status in the Democratic presidential nomination. Our team has been working on that project in the background. But last night I went back into my email from the period to remind myself of the precise order of events.
Warren was pretty much exactly the person you see today on the campaign trail and in debates: earnest, enthusiastic, a bit unvarnished.
Here is one of her first notes on the project …
And then later when we are about to kick the project off …
This was the first time I’d let anyone I didn’t know well post on the site freely and without review. So at the risk of mortifying revelation here is a note I wrote to her and her students with what amounts to a how-to about blogging with her reply (“neat!”) …
And finally here is her first post introducing the Talking Points Memo Bankruptcy Bill Blog …
As I noted above, we’ll be posting the whole archive in the near future. It should go without saying that TPM does not support any candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries. I’ve written as recently as this week that I think Warren is making a big, perhaps critical mistake firmly tying herself to Medicare for All in advance of a potential general election. But we are institutionally in possession of an illuminating look into Warren’s politics, policy views and personality well before she became a politician let alone a top tier presidential candidate. So we approach the project in that spirit.
