When Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., discusses her biography, she talks movingly about how her family finances all but cratered when she was a teenager after her dad suffered a heart attack and about her struggles for child care as a young mom.
Here's something Warren doesn't talk much about: When all that happened, she was a Republican. "A diehard conservative," one high school friend told Politico, which published an article about all this last week. "Sometimes surprisingly anti-consumer," recalled a law school colleague. In 1980, she wrote an influential paper on utilities regulation that essentially ignored the consumer issues she now champions.