Elizabeth Warren Raised $5.7 Million In Three Months. But Can She Beat Brown?

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/01/elizabeth-warren-interview-wall-street-senate-campaign

A month into her Senate campaign, Elizabeth Warren is at Tito's Bakery in Chelsea, Massachusetts, finding her sea legs. It's her first-ever appearance in this Boston suburb, meaning she's now officially spent as much time here as Martha Coakley, whose hapless showing in the January 2010 special Senate election against Republican Scott Brown is the reason Warren is running in the first place.

Warren schmoozes with the Argentine-born owners—"I loooooove bakeries," she says, with a slight Oklahoma drawl—and listens, arms folded, as a local recounts Chelsea's transition from affluent suburb to immigrant enclave. Warren, a Harvard Law School professor, eases patrons in and out of the conversation as if she's directing traffic, her eyes widened in a look of perpetual concern.

"Partly we are all subject to the whole influences of history," Warren jumps in, slipping briefly into lecture hall mode. "But it's also a decision by government: China is investing in infrastructure, building more roads and more bridges. Last year China spent 9 percent of GDP on infrastructure. The US is at 2.5 percent. The implications of that over five years—over 20 years—will be devastating."

That, in essence, is the idea driving Warren's unlikely candidacy—that the federal government has ceased to invest in what made America great. "We live in an America that has hammered, chipped, and squeezed the middle class," she tells a senior-center audience the next day. Like Occupy Wall Street and the brawls over union rights in Wisconsin and Ohio, Warren's race to retake the late Teddy Kennedy's seat from Brown has become a proxy war in the fight for the middle class. The race will almost certainly be one of the most expensive and most talked about of 2012. In just the first two and a half weeks of her candidacy, Warren raised $3 million; Brown already had more than $10.5 million in the bank.*