WASHINGTON — In Elizabeth Warren's world, credit card contracts would be so simple a teenager could read and understand them in four minutes. Loans would be as easy to compare as toasters, and online credit scores would be free.

"We need a new model: If you can't explain it, you can't sell it," said Warren, 60, a Harvard University law professor who is head of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The 1966 high school debate champion of Oklahoma may get what she wants. The House of Representatives will vote in December on her idea. She suggested a Financial Product Safety Commission in a 2007 article in the magazine Democracy. President Obama proposed it to Congress in June as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

POSSIBLE CANDIDATE

Warren won't discuss whether she may be a candidate to lead the authority, which would have the power to regulate $13.7 trillion of debt products. A Warren nomination would tell banks that Obama is determined to force reduced checking-account fees and limit lender claims in mortgage advertising, among other measures the industry opposes, said Thomas Cooley, dean of New York University's Stern School of Business.

"She is an ideological crusader," Cooley said. "She is a person who will stir up a lot of trouble." In a column in Forbes magazine, Cooley accused her of "waging a self-righteous holy war."

The criticism doesn't bother her, Warren said. She learned to shake things off growing up in Norman, Okla., with three older brothers "in a family of car parts and fist fights," she said. "It was get tough or die, and I decided to get tough."

The $700 billion bailout hasn't stopped the "culture of excessive risk-taking" that led to the financial crisis, Warren said during an oversight panel hearing on Nov. 19. TARP has "injected an unprecedented level of pricing distortions and moral hazard into the marketplace," she said.

Her detractors confuse prairie-born populism with elitism, probably because of her job, she said. On the faculty of Cambridge, Mass.-based Harvard since 1992, she is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law. Before Harvard, she taught law at five other universities in four states.

"Those comments are intended to be nasty, not accurate," said Warren, who graduated from high school at 16 and said she prefers Coors Light over iced tea. "I think a lot of Americans are not sure which side Washington is on, the side of banks or the side of the people."

Warren is a superstar to anyone who has been baffled by financial fine print, according to Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, a news and opinion Web site.

"She's been courageous in a culture where every other official is checking to see if what they're saying is going to affect their career," said Huffington, who met Warren when the professor was a guest on CNBC's "Squawk Box" and Huffington was hosting. "If she doesn't get the job, it would really mean that the special interests have won."

SETTING LIMITS

A measure the House Financial Services Committee approved on Oct. 22 would empower the consumer agency to set limits on checking account overdraft fees and to ban credit cards with escalating rates and lending practices it deems predatory. Similar legislation is before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee.

If such an authority had existed, Americans might not have taken out the subprime and other mortgages that touched off the recession when house prices fell, Warren said. Congress is rewriting financial rules after the 2007-2008 crisis caused $1.67 trillion in writedowns and losses.

The agency's opponents, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable, contend another layer of regulation would bury small community banks and rob consumers of freedom of choice in making basic financial decisions.

If Congress creates the watchdog, the director should have "a working knowledge of how financial institutions operate," said Scott Talbott, the financial roundtable's chief lobbyist.

"The time for pitchforks and torches is over," Talbott said. "The focus should be on reforming the system and making it better."

Warren's Wall Street experience consisted of a three-month summer associate position in 1975 at Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft, the financial district's oldest law firm, according to its Web site. Her aunt and mother moved to Rockaway, N.J., to care for her 4-year-old daughter while Warren worked at 2 Wall Street.

FORGING AHEAD

At Cadwalader, Warren earned "an astonishing amount of money" that she used to get braces, she said. By the time she received her degree in 1976 from Rutgers School of Law in Newark, N.J., she was expecting her second child, Alex. After Wall Street firms showed no interest in hiring a pregnant recent graduate, Warren said she worked from home, writing wills and doing real estate closings for "anyone who came in the door."

Warren said she probably inherited her populism from her grandparents, who built one-room Indian schools during the Great Depression. Her father was a maintenance man and her mother worked part time taking catalog orders. Warren didn't let them know she paid $25 application fees with baby-sitting money until she won a scholarship to George Washington University in Washington.

Warren said she doesn't know her credit score — "I assume it's good" — and maintains zero Visa and MasterCard balances.

"Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough and one will bite you," she said. "You have to remember what are incomes to banks are outgoes to families."

In her role overseeing the TARP, Warren has been critical of the administration, accusing the Treasury Department of undervaluing the stock warrants that were supposed to compensate taxpayers when banks repay their bailouts. A lack of transparency about how TARP functions "erodes the very confidence" it was to restore, her committee said in a report.

She'll "talk to anyone" about consumer protection and her belief that government should stop bank profits earned at the expense of people cheated by "tricks and traps," she said.

"I made a decision at the beginning that the experts wrecked this economy and the public has a right to know what's going on," she said. "It's our economy on the line and the experts can't be trusted."