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Warren Calls for Berkshires to Join Grassroots Campaign
 Elizabeth Warren during her first trip to the Berkshires in August. The Senate candidate returned last week to begin ramping up a grassroots network. |
"And I said to those people, 'Mine, too.' " Warren quipped in her opening remarks to a packed house at the volunteer sign-up and strategy rally at the Itam Lodge on Thursday.
"I have done one campaign, though. That was to get a Consumer Protection Bureau," she continued, to overwhelming cheers and applause from the room.
Warren first gained national attention when she conceived and made a reality of the new bureau under the Obama administration. She was first tapped by President Obama to lead the fledgling agency on an interim basis, but was passed up for permanent appointment because, many believe, of harsh opposition from Republicans in Congress.
The Harvard professor described the process of advancing the bureau's creation, despite even fiercer opposition from many corporate lobbies. "How do you beat the biggest lobbying force in the world if you have no real lobbying money? You get organized, and that's what we did," she said.
Warren said the same kind of widespread grassroots coalition will be needed in Massachusetts for her to defeat incumbent Scott Brown, the Wrentham Republican who won the 2009 special election following the death of longtime Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.
"What I took away from that is that's how you make real change. You make real change from one person to another, from that person to someone else, and we create in our own wind in our sails," said the Democrat.
Warren, an Oklahoma native who moved to Massachusetts in 1992, told supporters of her upbringing in a struggling middle-class working family. Of graduating from law school at 24, while nine months pregnant.
"I'm the daughter of a maintenance man and I ended up a fancypants professor at Harvard Law School," she joked, adding she is proof of the American dream because "I grew up in an America that invested in me."
That is not necessarily the America workers face today, however. Warren outlined her view on the ways in which economic depression had been allowed to occur again in the United State on a massive scale through the repeal and rollback of many of the bold initiatives that brought it out of the Depression of the 1930s and made it a superpower.
The brief talk was followed by an almost as brief working meeting to begin preparing volunteers. Warren introduced core campaign staffers, including key Deval Patrick campaign coordinator Doug Ruben, who talked with supporters about strategies for approaching next year's Senate campaign.
Warren told supporters at the Itam that her decision to run for Senate was in part because of the warm reception she received on her first visit here, during the campaign's testing-the-water phase.
"Pittsfield, you're a big part of this, too!" Warren proclaimed.
State Election