A  regular reader gave us a heads-up on the Elizabeth Warren story in the current edition of  New York Magazine. Insiders at her Lowell meeting a few weeks ago knew that she was being shadowed by the magazine’s writer Jason Zengerle. In “A Saint with Elbows” he poses the question -“In her race for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, is Elizabeth Warren running against Scott Brown and Obama?” As he chronicles Warren’s background and her entry into the race for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate, one significant aspect of both her campaign and his story takes place in the Andover home of well-known, longtime Democratic activist M. J. Powell:

No house party would become as significant as the one that a Democratic activist named M. J. Powell hosted in Andover in mid-August. When Warren officially announced her candidacy, on September 14, she did so with a web video, produced by the veteran Clinton consultant Mandy Grunwald, that had its populist moments (“Washington is rigged for big corporations that hire armies of lobbyists”) but, with its soft lighting and heavy focus on her upbringing, also came off as overly polished. Four days later, a Warren supporter named Anne Jones—who, unbeknownst to the campaign, had filmed Warren’s talk at the Andover house party—posted her own video on her ­YouTube channel that, until then, had only featured instructional videos about organic gardening. This was the Warren video that went viral.

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” Jones’s shaky camera catches Warren saying. Every successful businessman hires “workers the rest of us paid to educate” and moves his goods “on the roads the rest of us paid for.” More notable than her argument, though, is Warren’s tone—at turns angry, sarcastic, and, above all, uncompromising. “You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea—God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Link to the New York Magazine story here for Zengerle’s take on Warren and her campaign.

BTW – His story is accompanied by a photo of  Elizabeth Warren outside the Benjamin F. Butler School located on Gorham Street in Lowell.