Elizabeth Warren: Leading the pack (Getty)

After the last big “Year of the Woman” in American politics – 1992 – galvanized by Anita Thomas publicly accusing Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, it looked like women were on the road to gender parity in public office.

Twenty years later, we're still only 17 percent of officeholders,  while women are still at least 50 percent of the population. Hello there, Taxation without Representation?

In this regard, the US is way behind other countries. Many nations, from Spain and France to Rwanda and even Iraq, have tried to fix the rigged system with political parity laws, requiring parties to run female candidates by quota, or even reserving legislative seats for women. But the Q-word freaks Americans out, and mandated parity would never fly in the Land of the Free.

Women only seem to be players in American politics because of the marquee females in politics – HRC, Palin, Condi, Pelosi – whose notoriety proves the rule, and provides, as Rutgers Center for Women in Politics Director Debbie Walsh put it, “a veneer of accomplishment.”

This year, however, a record 18 women are running for the U.S. Senate (12 D, 6 R) and 163 running for the House (116 D, 47 R). So in a few days, we will know whether 2012 goes down in history asboth the year of the War on Women and another  “Year of the Woman” in American politics.

One reason is because partisan political women’s groups made a concerted effort to get women to run this year through the so-called 2012 Project, and financiers like former Clinton Ambassador Swanee Hunt’s Political Parity are passing around studies showing the women may be “more efficient” in office than men.

Before we start celebrating 2012’s milestones toward the Fem-ocracy, let’s remember that among the women running are also people like World Wrestling Federation millionaire Linda McMahon in Connecticut and Tea Party darling Kristi Noem from the great abortion-free state of North Dakota.

In the good news column, Massachusetts' Elizabeth Warren shows a good chance of beating pin-up boy Republican Scott Brown for Senate. A Harvard economic professor and champion of the consumer protections against predatory lending, she’s had to put up with Brown’s jokes about how glad he is that she didn’t pose nude like he did to pay for law school. “Thank God,” for that, he joked on a radio program, prompting Nancy Pelosi to call him out.

Ms. Warren is currently up by 5 points.

When Mr. Brown tweaked Ms. Warren on body image, was he being sexist or just playing hardball? Politics is one dirty game – game being the operative word. Like every other spectator sport in America, it’s played by men and covered by men.  It is impossible to discuss politics without falling back on sports metaphors.  

Women who play it must expect to take hits in body and soul. In American politics, of course, women are being reduced to their essential body parts anyway.  Form is destiny. An entire campaign season has just been reduced to uterine function, as far as women’s interests are concerned.

In a few days, we will know whether 2012 goes down in history as both the year of the War on Women and another  “Year of the Woman” in American politics. Among notable races:

• Democrat Tammy Baldwin running in Wisconsin against Tommy Thompson. The Wisconsin race is a tossup, but Ms. Baldwin would be the first lesbian elected to the Senate.

• In crucial swing state Nevada, Shelley Berkley is running against incumbent Dean Heller, in a nail-biter hanging on Latino voters.

• Hawaii has a historic woman v. woman race for the open Senate seat, which is pretty rare. The Democrat, Mazie Hirono, is favored to win over Gov. Linda Lingle.  Studies have shown that when there is one female in high office, like governor or U.S. Senate, states often end up electing a second woman to similarly high office. (to wit: California’s two female Senators and House Speaker Pelosi)

• On the incumbent side, Claire McCaskill is the only woman vulnerable in the U.S. Senate, but she appears likely now to beat “legitimate rape” Todd Akin.

It isn’t easy to get women to run in the first place. Large sums of money have been thrown at recruitment and training of women by both parties over the years, but for the same reason women don’t get to be CEOs – the kiddies seem to be our responsibility! – women don’t have time or money to start campaigning.

And then when they do, look out. Siobhan “Sam” Bennett first ran for mayor in 2001 of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and, she has said, in her first debate in a room full of press and committee men, she was asked: “Just what are your measurements?”

It could be true that something about running Allentown, Pa., requires a Mayor with a certain waist to hip ratio, but Ms. Bennett never found out. Undeterred, she ran for office again. “When I ran for US Congress in 2008, the following quote was plucked from the internet and emblazoned for multiple days with a color photo of me across the front of our tribune paper, ‘Sammy Bennett is a phony political wh*** who gives good head and makes cheap political opportunists look like fuc**** Mother Theresa, even her p***y is made of plastic.”

Ms. Bennett survived all that to found Name It Change It, which works to identify and call out sexism directed at women of all political stripes. We'll find out on Wednesday whether our country is any closer to making her group defunct.

Maybe then, women like U.S. Senatorial candidates Kirsten Gillibrand and Wendy Long won't have to field inane questions about 50 Shades of Gray at their sole debate. So where is that whip, anyway?

Bloomberg. (Getty)

If you see Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the street on the No. 4 train in the next week or two, do offer him a cup of cocoa and an hour or two of your time, to listen. He is sad. Neither of the presidential candidates have had the courage, the will, the determination to stick it to their entire coalitions of supporters in exchange for the endorsement of the Mayor of New York City.

He gives each of them a checklist of competing priorities, and what do they do? They disagree with some of them. Mitt Romney will not endorse same-sex marriage; President Obama refuses to cease his domestic reconstruction of the Soviet Union. Neither will ban guns. What's a billionaire 22 times over left to do but throw change at people like Scott Brown and otherwise whine to the New York Times about how he can't get what he wants?

The fact that campaigns spend so much time calling upon the mayor at his 100-millionth-floor lair atop New York City, or inviting him to lunch at the White House, or golfing with him on the Vineyard, is bizarre, but wholly unsurprising. This, the prospect of a Michael Bloomberg endorsement, is the sort of thing—the pinnacle of things!—that wealthy donors, enbubbled advisors, and media dingbats would consider a "game-changer," pure electoral college jackpot. Remember how then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel used to spend more than 0% of his limited time lobbying for approval from David Brooks, a Bethesda newspaper columnist that no one—even David Brooks—ever listens to? The situation with Bloomberg is like that, exactly like that, especially in how the approval is never won.

How is Obama expected to reason with a man who, as he told the New York Times this weekend, believes Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren intends to "close the banks and get rid of corporate profits, and we’d all bring socialism back, or the U.S.S.R.?” Get rid of profits, add socialism, the U.S.S.R.—you know, some mix-and-match basket of those things. Of course, Mr. Obama is a touch to the right of Elizabeth Warren, so perhaps Mr. Bloomberg figures he'd compromise with a Democratic Senate for a more modest seizure of the means of production.

Even in the areas where Mr. Bloomberg agrees with the president—social issues—his stubborn side prevents him from offering credit. "Let’s get serious here," the mayor told the Times about Mr. Obama's announcement in support of same-sex marriage, "it was Joe Biden that forced that issue." This is how people who don't understand national politics think, despite their reputations as centrist political genius superhealers. While the White House has confessed that Vice President Joe Biden's words of support for same-sex marriage expedited Mr. Obama's planned rollout, there was, in fact, a planned rollout. Presidents don't change their platforms on major issues solely because the Veep runs his mouth on a teevee chat show. They do it because of ideological shifts within their coalitions.

Mr. Bloomberg doesn't like Mr. Obama because he's placed light restrictions on large banks that help New York City balance its budget when they inflate to ungodly proportions in fake-good times. That's his prerogative. What would it cost to procure the endorsement of this one man, who's most known nationally right now as the jerk who won't let hardworking folk purchase big-ass cups of soda pop? Too much, for very little.

Mr. Bloomberg sounds like a guy who really, really wants to endorse Mitt Romney, doesn't he? He likes that Mitt Romney is rich. He made a lot of money doing whatever in the financial sector—Mr. Bloomberg loves this. But Mr. Romney won't support gun control or action against climate change, because those are directly against what his coalition supports, so, yeah, no Bloomberg endorsement there, and who cares about this guy anyway?

The Mayor is, of course, welcome to not make an endorsement. But to whine about how neither candidate supports his full menu of policy preferences is insufferable. Not many voters out there are voting because their preferences are exactly in line with one candidate or the other. They prioritize, depending on what's most important to them at the time. It's part of being in a coalition.

As the Times notes, Mr. Bloomberg himself has made a "cleareyed assessment that he could not win" a presidential race. That's true, and it's not because he's short or Jewish or from New York City, as he likes to joke. It's because he's too egotistical to go about the business of national coalition-building, too stubborn to bother managing competing demands. His frustration now is that he can't get either of the candidates to squarely shoot their supporters in the eye—not with a real gun, mind you—which he views as statesmanship at its best. It's juvenile in its romanticism. Besides, of course, he’s always welcome to take a shot at the White House himself.

Bloomberg reports:

The attorneys general say they are now invited to the nation's capital and talk with Warren by telephone almost weekly as she sets up the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. On Nov. 30, Warren traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to plot strategy at the prosecutors' winter meeting.

Ever since the foreclosure crisis went nationwide and attorneys general from all 50 states have been treated by the press as a monolithic enformecment entity (probably partly because it's intellectually gratifying to show off that you know it's not "attorney generals"). It's been fun for us to think of them as this pack of trained animals that one can unleash on the financial service industry, and apparently Elizabeth Warren feels the same way.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

For starters, he's not in favor of lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars on Elizabeth Warren and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Welch: Do I cut that silly consumer protection agency's budget when they gave that Harvard professor $450 million to run a consumer protection agency. Right out of the barrel! $450 million for a budget! Are you crazy?! You can't do that!

Rose: You're not in favor of consumer protection?

Welch: For $450 million as a budget?! ... Maybe for $50 million.

Welch is also opposed to government handouts, and he believes Obama has been bad at creating jobs. Here's the video:

The guy in question, Rajeev V. Date, "was an active participant in the debate" over this year's Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, The Times says. But also, at the same time, Date was a director of Prosper Marketplace, "a so-called peer-to-peer lender" that experienced a default rate of "more than 25 percent." Yikes!

But then again:

There is no evidence that Mr. Date has violated any ethics or disclosure rules; a Treasury Department official said Mr. Date resigned from the Prosper Marketplace board before joining the bureau and, because he is still a shareholder of Prosper Marketplace, he will recuse himself from working on any issues related to peer-to-peer lending.

Here's a screengrab of Prosper's website.

Dirty, dirty Elizabeth Warren: Last month, Bloomberg revealed that -- shockingly -- she had made $90,000 providing expert testimony in lawsuits against big financial firms. Who would've imagined conflicts of interest would emerge during the establishment of a $500 million agency to regulate the banking industry? Unthinkable.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

"Thanks to the new law, for the first time ever, we will have a single federal agency charged with writing the rules for all mortgages and all credit cards, regardless of whether they are issued by a federally chartered bank, a state chartered credit union, or a group of unlicensed investors," she said.

Warren also outlined her general approach to financial regulation. As Reuters' Felix Salmon points out, she's interested in outlining principles, rather than hard-and-fast rules, to foster transparent behavior among banks. The distinction is important, Salmon says: "Warren, remember, is a law professor: she knows full well that the main effect of laying down rules is to send a thousand lawyers scurrying to find ways around them. And she's surely also seen the way in which other regulators - the SEC springs to mind - become overrun by lawyers looking for people breaking rules, rather than regulators trying to ensure a clean and level playing field."

The idea is that the Protection Bureau can skirt the bureaucratic mess of trying to spot particular instances of wrongdoing and instead work to get banks be more clear about what their products do. The increased clarity would result in a market where consumers can make informed choices about what banks currently offer. A product that's bad for consumers won't last long if consumers know it's bad for them, and products that are mutually beneficial to consumers and banks will prosper.

This is perhaps a little surprising, given that Warren has advocated breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, subjecting them to more scrutiny, raising their taxes, making them take out insurance and proposing that they make transactions with consumers more transparent.

Nevertheless, banks have apparently been receptive to Warren's suggestion that their contracts with consumers not be enormous, indecipherable tomes of legalese buried in their own fine print. She said that many banks realize that the current situation is "unsustainable." Warren is pushing for a standard two-page credit card agreement between banks and consumers.

The ultimate goal is to prevent banks from teasing consumers with low initial rates and then springing usurious fees and rate increases on them over time.

"If we can get these products simpler so that the price is clear up front, then the prices are actually having to compete head to head, and the card issuers that are charging the most are going to find themselves with fewer customers," she said. "That's how markets work."

(h/t Reuters)

Bloomberg asked Warren if she would run crying to Obama if she wound up in a dispute with Geithner. Warren said that she, the President and the Treasury Secretary "see eye-to-eye on this consumer agency. And because of that, we are all trying to push in the same direction."

Sounds good enough, but there's also a fundamental problem. Warren and Geithner will at some stages be working toward divergent goals. Geithner's job is to protect the financial system and by extension the broader economy. Warren, meanwhile, is charged with keeping banks from ripping off consumers too badly -- a cause that could easily eat into banks' profit margins at a time when the system is still recovering from a shock. Sparks have flown before between Warren and Geithner. We'll see how effectively they work together now that they have to.

Warren's strange, wordy title -- Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- reflects the Obama administration's desire to put her at the head of the organization's founding while avoiding the Senate confirmation process needed to officially put her in the director's seat.

As of now, Warren's power will be limited to staffing up the bureau, creating an organizational structure and prioritizing new regulations. In her current role, she won't be allowed to create new regulations. She would have to be selected as the director and then be confirmed by the Senate to make actual specific policy choices.

Wall Street pundits remain confused about Warren's actual role going forward. Some believe she's being groomed for the top spot, while others think she'll be given the boot once the agency is up and running. Felix Salmon offers a reasonable assessment: Her role as architect of the bureau will quell lawmakers' concerns and grease the skids for her eventual nomination.

In a story that somewhat corroborates an earlier report by Bloomberg, The New York Times and ABC are saying that the "assistant to the president" role is one held by other high-powered officials like Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. In addition to Obama, Warren will report to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, The Times says.

The administration wants to basically give Warren an internship instead of an outright nomination because Congress could easily stymie her confirmation and thus prevent the Protection Bureau from actually trying to protect consumers any time soon.

As for how well Warren will enjoy working for Geithner, here are some videos of their past interactions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz7ruJw6byQ&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJdK8VR5aqY&feature=related