Elizabeth Warren: Can a liberal champion win over the center in Massachusetts?

Karen Tumulty, Washington Post, 5/7/12

LAWRENCE, Mass. — There was a time in this country’s history when “class warfare” was more than an epithet politicians hurled at each other. That is one reason the Everett Mills here was a place where Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had no trouble bringing a crowd to its feet.

She was standing Friday morning on the site where, 100 years ago, immigrant textile workers launched a bloody two-month walkout that became famous as the Bread and Roses strike. Middle-class Americans once again have had enough, Warren declared, with a system that in the 21st century is stacked against them by Wall Street and its political allies.

“They attacked collective bargaining. Over 30 years, they’ve attacked pensions. They’ve attacked wages. They’ve attacked health care. They have attacked unions. They have attacked working families, and now we find ourselves in a very different world,” the Harvard law professor and consumer advocate told about 120 people at a Merrimack Valley AFL-CIO breakfast. “ We find ourselves in a world when we are recovering from the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, and yet, those who brought us the crisis have not been held accountable.”

That kind of us-vs.-them passion quickens the pulse and opens the checkbooks of liberals around the country. Massachusetts has become their marquee Senate race of 2012, a referendum on the state of liberalism itself. Many on the left, disillusioned and disappointed with the Obama administration, have turned to Warren as their new champion.

full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/elizabeth-warren-can-a-liberal-champion-win-over-the-center-in-massachusetts/2012/05/06/gIQA5MVH6T_singlePage.html