Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who helped set up the US government’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is a candidate for US Senate from Massachusetts in 2012. If she wins the Democratic primary, she will challenge Republican Scott Brown, who was chosen in a special election to replace the late Ted Kennedy.
As Slate reported:
Though popular among Democrats and progressives who feel she is supremely qualified and a tenacious consumer advocate, Warren has long been seen as a political lightning rod—disliked by many Republicans who say her approach to Wall Street will be too heavy-handed.
Senate Republicans said they would block any attempt by Obama to appoint Warren to head the CFPB, which is designed to protect consumers against unfair and illegal banking practices.
A favorite Republican meme is that because of her Harvard connection, Warren is an out-of-touch elitist.
Here are a couple of problems for Republicans trying to portray her as such:
–As the daughter of a maintenance man in Oklahoma City, Warren is hardly a product of the elite.
After her father had a heart attack, she says, her family existed on “the ragged edge” of the middle class. “We lost our car. We almost lost a house,” she told one man… She later told reporters that she was babysitting by age 9, waiting tables at 13, married at 19, a mother and elementary school teacher at 22.
–She is capable of talking like this:
Update: As a bonus, she drives Rush Limbaugh into a crazy rant (admittedly not hard to do) in which, for some reason, he tells the story of the Little Red Hen.
