Washington state’s junior senator, Sen. Maria Cantwell, is both a technocrat and a populist.
Getting her footing in the Senate just as the Enron debacle was blowing up in the early 2000s, Cantwell found her niche drawing up wonked-out policy from a lefty perspective to protect energy consumers and energy markets. Cantwell spent the first several years of her Senate career doing obscure, yeoman’s corporate accountability work, like passing the Commodities Future Modernization Act to regulate energy derivatives. (And her nerdy but righteous toiling continues: During last year’s health care squabbles, she locked in an unsung corporate accountability amendment to regulate pharmaceutical profiteering by pharmaceutical benefit management companies, PBMs.)
However, as the Democrats struggle to respond to Wall Street wrongdoing and the great recession, Cantwell’s detail-oriented populism has suddenly turned her into a high profile and invaluable Senator for the Democrats—the “Most Valuable Senator” of 2009, according to the lefist mag The Nation.

Cantwell sat down for a 20-minute interview with PubliCola yesterday to talk about her emergence as the Democrats populist all-star (or black sheep?) whose yearlong challenge to Democratic President Barack Obama’s economic policies has put the national spotlight on her banking reform message—a message that may be the Democrats’ only hope of warding off a major backlash from angry voters and Tea Partiers in November.
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PubliCola: I want to talk about the populist note you’ve been hitting nonstop lately. Voting against the bailouts, dressing down [Treasury] Secretary Geithner, voting against [Fed Chair] Bernanke last week—you’ve been consistently sending a message to the Obama administration that on economic policy, they don’t get it. Does President Obama just not get it on economic issues?
Sen. Cantwell: Well, first of all, I think that this is actually a message about competitive capitalism too. I believe in good old-fashioned American capitalism where you have true competition and transparent markets. And that you have money flow to IPOs to create new technology. If you’re spending all your money in dark derivative markets—and that’s more lucrative—then how are you really getting capital flowing to small businesses?
So while it may seem it’s just “populist,” it’s really about what’s made our country great. Getting capital and competition has made our country great. And if the big banks are too big, and they push the small banks out, and more and more concentration of big banks is the norm, that’s going to hurt the competitiveness and effectiveness of getting capital to small businesses.
PubliCola: Do you think that President Obama doesn’t understand that?
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