Elizabeth Warren, A Former Republican, Explains, Supports Occupy Wall Street

Elizabeth Warren says she supports the Occupy Wall Street movement, and in fact, says she created the foundation that the movement is based upon — and she’s right. Warren is challenging Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown for his seat — formerly the seat of Ted Kennedy, the lion of the Senate. In an interview in The Daily Beast Monday, Warren says, “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” Warren says. “I support what they do.”

Warren’s boast isn’t bluster: As a professor of commercial law at Harvard and the force behind Obama’s consumer-protection bureau, Warren has been one of the most articulate voices challenging the excesses of Wall Street. Still, she enjoys an outsize celebrity for an academic and bureaucrat: a favorite guest of Jon Stewart, Warren, 62, has become a hero to the left, a villain to the right, and a fascination for everyone in between. Now that she is challenging Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown, she has emerged this year as a poster child for what some of America loves, and an increasing swath of America hates, about the president.

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For all those quaking on the right at the sight of an ascendant Warren, rest easy. Warren’s no lefty. In fact, Warren was a registered Republican into her 40s. When it comes to ideology, Warren makes for a rotten heir to Kennedy.

“I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets. I think that is not true anymore,” Warren says. “I was a Republican at a time when I felt like there was a problem that the markets were under a lot more strain. It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role.”

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Still, you don’t need to look at Warren’s biography to realize that conservatives’ fears are misplaced. Warren’s studies have centered on debt, in particular the stress that the modern workplace puts on families. In The Two-Income Trap, her 2003 book, Warren argued that two-income families are less financially secure than families with a single earner. “Her complaints on behalf of the middle class sound positively Nixonian,” Christopher Caldwell wrote this summer in the Weekly Standard (where “Nixonian” can be a compliment). Go ahead and find another Democrat, particularly one who makes liberals swoon, being called a “closet conservative” as a compliment.

In this video, former Geico ads voiceover actor D.C. Douglas, who “ran into a little trouble with the Tea Party,” uses clips of Elizabeth Warren to explain what happened to the financial system in America, and what gave birth to Occupy Wall Street. It’s brilliant.

Oh, and for some fun, have a look at D.C.’s explanation as to why he doesn’t work for Geico anymore.