Oh the humanity!

WASHINGTON – Summoned to the White House in September 2010, Elizabeth Warren met President Obama in the Oval Office and he escorted her outside to a garden patio. Obama described it to Warren as a hidden retreat. But Warren, writing in a new political memoir, says the weather was hot, and the patio, confined between hedges, “felt like a green version of Hell.”

Obama had already told Warren during a previous visit that he would not name her to lead the agency that was her brainchild – the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — because of objections from Senate Republicans and bankers. “You make them very nervous,” he told her in that previous conversation, which Warren says ended with “a perfunctory hug.”

Now, Obama wanted her to perform the hard work of setting up the agency, even without the promise of the ultimate leadership role. What’s more, she would have to work with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, one of her rivals who had opposed her nomination to direct the bureau. Warren, as she recounts in “A Fighting Chance,” at first rejected the president’s request. […]

Later, her relationship with Summers would turn frosty. And after legislation creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Summers and other Obama advisers reportedly opposed nominating Warren to run it.

Warren recounted that one of Obama’s advisers – whom she doesn’t name — suggested that someone else be named director, while Warren could serve as “cheerleader” for the new agency.

“I assume that was meant as a metaphor, but I had to wonder: Cheerleader?” Warren writes. “Would the same suggestion have been made to a man in my position? I did not rush out to buy pom-poms.”