Meet the inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street movement, Elizabeth Warren.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:

Elizabeth Warren is running for office in the most high-profile race in the country not involving Barack Obama. It’s a position that calls for some tact. So what does she think about the Occupy Wall Street protests that are roiling the country? 

“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she 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. 

No one else has Warren’s gift to send the right into a sputtering frenzy.

I KNEW I liked these protesters!

Elizabeth Warren may end up being just about the best hope for the future of progressives in this country.

Which is surprising when you consider the following:

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.” 

It wasn’t until later in life, when Warren was 46, that she had her political awakening. At the time, she was serving on a committee recommending changes to the nation’s bankruptcy laws. Until then, Warren says, “I said, ‘No, no, no, not for me on the politics.' ” 

Warren decided then, in 1995, she could no longer retreat into the ivory tower. “I can’t just leave this to people who are going to wreck the lives of millions of American families if they get the chance,” she says. “I waded in.”

You know there may be no better Democrat, than a reformed Republican. Warren is smart, fearless, and determined to make a positive change in this country. And if she is not completely deprogrammed from her conservative past she is certainly light years away from the anti-women's rights, anti-middle class, anti-intellectual conservatives that we have seen far too much of lately.

As far as I am concerned Warren embodies much of what I hope to see from future candidates in this country, regardless of which political party they emerge from. Especially potential candidates like Elizabeth Warren who clearly scares the hell out of the corporations who are pulling the puppet strings of the vast number of our current politicians, on BOTH sides of the partisan divide.