Warren stumps on the Cape | CapeCodOnline.com

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Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren gets a standing ovation at the end of her speech at the Barnstable Senior Center on Saturday afternoon.Steve Heaslip/ Cape Cod Times

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HYANNIS ? Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren whipped up a crowd of about 200 supporters at the Barnstable Senior Center Saturday.

Filling all the seats and stuffed into every corner, people clapped and cheered for each point made by the 62-year-old, pixy-like Harvard law professor. She made several stops from Falmouth to Truro Saturday during a Cape visit.

In Barnstable, they gave her a standing ovation even before she could completely utter her final goal, which Warren said, is to beat U.S. Senator Scott Brown, a Republican from Wrentham, in 2012.

Brown won the senate seat held for almost 50 years by the late Edward Kennedy, a Democrat.

A champion debate team member as a student in Oklahoma, Warren got her message across clearly and concisely on Saturday, beginning with her life story.

Warren's rallying cry is her desire to help the middle class and to rescue the old America where children typically did better than their grandparents.

She said the country needed to ?invest in itself,? that is, in education, research and infrastructure.
That's what helped her get ahead.

?I grew up in a middle class family that was hanging on, sometimes with white knuckles,? she said.

Her father, Donald Herring, a maintenance man, suffered a heart attack when Warren was in middle school. Her mother took a job working at Sears. They lost the family car, Warren said.

All three of her brothers entered the U.S. military, she added.

Warren excelled at school, graduating high school at 16.

She said she used a federal student loan program that encouraged students to enter fields, such as special education, that required manpower. After completing college at George Washington University, Warren became a special education teacher, and a portion of her loans were forgiven, she said.

?That was when America invested in its kids,? she said.

Barnstable Town Councilor Janet Joakim, of Centerville, told Warren her own daughter must make monthly student loan payments that are higher than her parents' mortgage payments.

?She'll never be able to buy a home,? Joakim told Warren.

?That's one of our most serious issues,? Warren said. ?Young people are getting further and further behind.?

Government programs such as the G.I. Bill and Project Head Start as well as community colleges and public universities, helped students get ahead, she said.

Today, attention to education, research and the country's infrastructure is way down; the proportion of the gross domestic product spent on research in the U.S. has gone down by 50 percent since the 1960s, Warren said.

China spends 10 percent of it gross domestic product on infrastructure and Europe spends 5 percent, she added.

?America spends 2.4 percent and we're trying to figure out how to cut it,? Warren said to applause.
Warren became a lawyer and then a law professor working at three universities before taking the job at the Harvard Law School in 1995.

In 2008, she was selected by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to chair the Congressional Oversight Panel, which was created to monitor the $700 billion bank bailout effort known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

?Secretary (Henry) Paulson of the U.S. Treasury was shoveling money to financial institutions with no strings attached,? she said. ?The failure to make people (in the financial sector) accountable is a dark stain in our country.?

One person asked Warren how she differed from Brown on the topic reproductive rights for women.
She said Brown co-sponsored a bill that would allow employers and insurers to limit specific health care coverage, including contraception, based on religious or moral objections.

?This isn't about religion,? Warren said. ?What its really about is widening the number of insurers and employers who can deny basic health care needs ... I think it's profoundly wrong.?

Warren said she has a special connection to Cape Cod. The mother and father of her husband, Bruce Mann, are buried in a Hyannis cemetery.

Source: http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120225/NEWS11/120229848/-1/rss04

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