Our hero hits the campaign trail

Elizabeth Warren, the brain behind the new consumer protection bureau, is running for Ted Kennedy's old Massachusetts Senate seat, in an effort to oust Republican Scott Brown who was elected on the strength of Tea Party support at the height of the right- wing anti-"Obama health care" hysterics.

Jill Lawrence at The Atlantic reports on Warren's first round of outreach to voters:

Warren is by far the biggest name in the Democratic primary and is already pulling in national money from Democrats determined to oust Brown. By midday Thursday, she was the "busiest recipient" at the ActBlue.com fundraising clearinghouse, with more than $310,000 in contributions. EMILY's List sent out a fundraising email on her behalf headlined "It's on in Massachusetts," asking members to "stop Scott Brown and the Tea Party in their tracks."

In addition to liberals and women, Warren can expect strong support from labor. She energized a union audience on Labor Day in a populist speech that included a mention of her brother, a retired crane operator who was a union member. She also has close ties to small business. Her daughter runs one, she told a voter, and wants a simpler tax code. She knows there are loopholes that might help her, Warren said, but she can't afford to hire a lawyer to find them.

While Warren is a heroine in some circles for conceiving, pushing and setting up a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that passed last year in a Wall Street reform bill, it's unclear how much Massachusetts voters know about her. Six men walking into The Student Prince during her visit said they were there for dinner, not Warren. "Who's she?" one of them asked.

Given the money flowing to her campaign, it's a good bet almost everyone in the state will end up knowing some version of Warren's David & Goliath tale: Taking on banks and Wall Street to protect regular people just trying to get fair deals on mortgages, credit cards and student loans. It's a message with potential. Philip Jubinville, 58, of Holyoke, an accounts manager for a manufacturing firm, quoted a TV clip in which Warren talked about seniors getting by on less while big corporations don't pay any taxes. "That sticks in my craw," Jubinville said as he awaited Warren at the bar. "There's something fundamentally wrong with that."

When Republicans vowed to block Warren's nomination to head the agency she created, Obama nominated someone else. That was a disappointment to many, but maybe one with a silver lining. It seems likely that Warren in the Senate would have more and broader influence on the course of the nation -- if she can figure out how to accomplish anything within that clotted institution.

"It's a kind of question of what you see as possible," Warren told me when I asked about that. She said the new consumer protection bureau is proof that even outsiders, as she has been until now, can make a difference. "If you're actually on the inside making that kind of noise, pushing that hard, organizing a lot of people to push in the same direction, I think change is possible," she said.

Mark Schmitt, at New Deal 2.0 has a great background piece detailing how Warren's first major political role was putting the need for bankruptcy reform on the legislative map. He suggests that Elizabeth Warren is the kind of strong, committed voice that can elevate a Senate seat above and beyond wheeling-and-dealing politics as usual:

(A)very few Senators are able to have an impact far greater than their institutional clout because they ignore institutional power and treat the Senate as a platform for ideas. That’s what Paul Wellstone did at the peak of his career (although it took him a while to figure it out), or the great liberal figures of the 1980s and earlier, Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio and William Proxmire of Wisconsin. On the right, Jesse Helms did much the same thing. Because any senator can introduce any amendment at any time, and with a subcommittee she can hold hearings on almost anything, she can force debates that the American political process doesn’t want to have. Combine that with a good use of all the external platforms that are available to a person with the words “U.S. Senator” before his or her name, and it can become an enormous megaphone for what Warren did with bankruptcy and the CFPB: putting an issue or an idea on the agenda. And if she’s elected, she might show some of her colleagues that if they want to make a difference, they have to do more than sit around and vote in committee meetings.

Here's a link to DONATE TO ELIZABETH WARREN'S SENATE CAMPAIGN.