Occupy Wall Street sweetheart and Massachusetts Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren spent Tuesday evening hobnobbing with Hollywood celebrities and fundraising for her campaign at the home of Emmy Award-winning television producer Norman Lear, The Daily Caller has confirmed.
Dubbing Warren liberal Hollywood’s new “It girl,” The Hollywood Reporter’s Tina Daunt wrote last month that Lear and his wife Linda would be co-hosting an event for Warren, featuring such stars as Barbra Streisand, Rhea Perlman, Danny DeVito and Hans Zimmer.
Attending the event required a donation of between $1,000 and $5,000, continuing Warren’s trend of raising money outside the state where she is actually running.
The Boston Globe reported in late October that, according to Warren’s campaign filings, nearly 70 percent of the $3.14 million Warren raised last quarter to unseat Republican Sen. Scott Brown was from out-of-state donors.
Warren spokesman Kyle Sullivan would not give TheDC any details about last night’s star-studded event, but addressed the relative dearth of in-state campaign donors, saying that the Harvard professor is still building support in the state and around the country.
“Elizabeth’s fight for middle class families is gaining strong support here at home, with more than 11,000 Massachusetts contributors and people across the country who want Elizabeth in the United States Senate taking on the big banks and special interests to make Washington work for the middle class instead,” Sullivan wrote in an email to TheDC.
Streisand publicist Dick Guttman told TheDC that Streisand, who has already publicly praised Warren, was thrilled to attend the event. (RELATED: Warren jokes she’s ‘going for the hick vote’)
“[Streisand] was delighted to meet her,” Guttman said, noting that he believes it was the first time the pair had crossed paths.
Massachusetts’ unlikely Hollywood’s darling has been a big voice for liberalism early on in the campaign cycle.
Notably, one video of an impassioned speech she gave during a “talking tour” in September addressing “class warfare” went viral, eliciting cheers from liberals and scoffs from conservatives.
“I hear all this, you know: ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’ No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” she said. “You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear — you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.
“You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, 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.”