I’ve been marveling at the passion that has surrounded Elizabeth Warren being nominated to head the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection being established within the Federal Reserve. Republicans and Wall Street seem to despise the lady, while Democrats and liberals are pushing hard for President Obama to put her in the job. Evidently, she’s a shoo-in for the nomination and has already started lobbying for confirmation, according to one report.

The passion on both sides, I think, relates less to her qualifications than to the fact that she differs greatly from the previous people Obama has picked for high-profile jobs impacting the markets and the economy. Two come to mind: Timothy Geithner, who was already in the pockets of the big banks long before he was picked for the Treasury, and Mary Schapiro, who was head of a regulatory agency with a mediocre track record before she was picked for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

These were two rock-ribbed establishmentarians, people who could be expected to make Wall Street seem warm and fuzzy. As Paul Krugman pointedly asked the other day, “Where’s this administration’s Frances Perkins?” A lot of people seem to feel that Elizabeth Warren may fit the role played by Perkins during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, when she was Labor Secretary and a stalwart of New Deal values.

Warren, head of the congressional TARP oversight panel, has been called “scary” by Republicans and financial types. She definitely has a strong record in that job, so it’s little wonder that she has antagonized people like Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. She’s the real deal, not a faux reformer like the grossly overhyped Clinton administration SEC chairman, Arthur Levitt. Levitt was so skilled at reaping sycophantic press coverage (such as this) that it was overlooked that Levitt, among other things, joined with Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers to torpedo efforts to regulate over-the-counter derivatives.

So there’s no denying that Warren, a Harvard Law professor who gets credit for coming up with the idea of the consumer protection agency, is a departure from Obama’s humdrum past financial appointments. He could certainly do worse (such as by moving Mary Schapiro or Timothy Geithner into that job). But I also think that he could do a heck of a lot better. Warren, despite all her many fine attributes, is not a game changer. Sure, she’s giving the Street agita, but what it really needs is a heart attack.

With that objective in mind, I humbly submit the following alternatives for presidential consideration:

Joe Borg: True, state regulators seem to spend more of their time kvetching than getting things done nowadays. But among their ranks are some top-notch people. Borg, head of the Alabama Securities Commission and bane of the boiler rooms since the 1990s, would be a great choice. Read more about him here.

Eric Dinallo: He was an ace white-collar prosecutor in Manhattan and used to be New York’s Insurance Commissioner. He’s now running for New York State Attorney General. I think he ought to take his hat out of the ring and move to Washington. I can just see a scrappy, ambitious guy like Dinallo turning the Consumer Protection Bureau into the financial-services industry’s worst nightmare, which it needs to be.

Jim Chanos: He’s a short-seller and was one of the first people to identify the rot at banks like Bear Stearns. He first gained public recognition for doing the hard work that identified Enron as the scam that it was. Chanos infuriates corporate CEOs that hate people criticizing their companies—which makes him well qualified to run an agency that should take a lot of heat.

A consumer advocate: If Obama really wants to make the consumer agency an agent of change, he can take the breathtakingly obvious step of nominating an honest-to-goodness consumer advocate to head an agency with “consumer protection” in the title. We’ve gotten so accustomed to bankers being hired to run banking regulators, and brokers being hired to run brokerage regulators, that we’ve forgotten that regulators aren’t always captured by people they regulate.

Sometimes regulators actually are motivated to regulate. There are plenty of longtime consumer advocates who could make the cut: Stephen Brobeck of the Consumer Federation of America, and Joan Claybrook, former head of Public Citizen, come immediately to mind. But there are plenty of eager-beaver consumer advocates who’d be great in this job, and all would give banking lobbyists so much heartburn that the Brioschi would flow like Niagara Falls.

Eliot Spitzer: The Obama administration has repeatedly ignored my entreaties to put this testosterone-fueled litigator in charge of something meaningful. It’s an unforgivable waste of human resources to have the banking industry’s worst nightmare on the sidelines. Hire Spitzer and bankers will be praying for Elizabeth Warren—or Joan Claybrook.

Any one of these distinguished public servants would be a great choice for the job. President Obama, the ball is in your court.