“Just because you do not take an interest in politics

doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” Pericles 495 BC - 429 BC

Thank god for American Crossroads’ schizophrenia.  The Karl Rove backed institution thrust Elizabeth Warren into the limelight this week with its dueling anti-Warren commercials.  Crossroads portrayed Warren first as the brewer of the Occupy Wall Street movement and then as the bailer out of the very same Wall Street banks she was supposedly responsible for Occupying.

And in doing so American Crossroads brought this senate candidate to the forefront of media debate, and for this we should be thankful.

Warren’s campaign battle for Senate in Massachusetts against Tea Party candidate Scott Brown may not only decide the balance of power in the Senate, but it also just might define the character of our nation for years to come.

The fight between big bank backed Brown and the janitor’s daughter turned Harvard law professor, Warren, embodies the current US identity crisis.

Main Street vs Wall Street.  Tea Party vs. Occupy.

You can watch the normally soft-spoken creator of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the former Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) release her inner bulldog, and highlighting her great understanding of the inner workings of these complicated deals- asking some tough questions of Timothy Geithner during the TARP hearings.  This is one of the many events that has turned Wall Street against her.

According to a Vanity Fair story on Warren:

“…Warren would pay a price for those hearings. ‘Geithner hated her,’ says a former administration official. Part of it was seen as personal because she had scorched him in public. But the whole thrust of her work on the oversight panel—getting the facts out to the public—was at odds with Geithner’s perceived conviction, shared by the Wall Street establishment, that the details of the banks’ TARP rescue should be hidden from public scrutiny whenever possible in order to give the banks time to recover…”

According to Open Secrets:

“Since launching her U.S. Senate campaign in August, Warren has pulled in more than $3.15 million — with a whopping 57 percent of that sum coming from small-dollar donors who each contributed $200 or less. According to research by the Center for Responsive Politics, Warren has raised just 3.5 percent of her war chest, or $110,050, from interests in the finance, insurance and real estate sector.

By contrast, the finance, insurance and real estate sector is Brown’s No. 1 supporter.

Since Brown jumped onto the national stage in 2009 when he began running to fill the Senate vacancy created in the wake of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death, Brown has raised about $23.6 million.

According to the Center’s research, Brown has relied on the finance, insurance and real estate sector for about $1 out of every $8 he’s collected.”

So now it seems that we must decide are we a nation that venerates Wall Street, hoping that deregulation at the top and cuts at the bottom will support our nation or are we a nation that respects the lives of all of our citizens enough for corporations and those at the top to pay more to rebuild a middle class at a time when scarcity pervades our collective psyche? 

Every congress person has control over how the government controls your tax dollars, protects your rights and much much more.  FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN TAKE ACTION HERE Your voice matters in this senate race no matter where you live.

Watch ABOW with Elizabeth Warren in San Francisco.