Posters heralding the Greater Boston Labor Council’s support for Elizabeth Warren’s US Senate candidacy dominated a Park Plaza Hotel ballroom this morning.
She may have shared the stage with part of the state’s congressional delegation and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, but from the moment Warren stepped into the Imperial Ballroom, she was the focus of television cameras and the nearly 500 people who gathered for the annual Labor Day breakfast.
Most speakers were afforded a standing ovation when they finished; Warren brought the audience to its feet simply by being introduced.
“Washington is rigged to work for the big guys,” she said. “We want a Washington for working people.”
Warren was reprising a visit to the Labor Day breakfast, where she spoke last year before announcing her candidacy.
She called US Senator Scott Brown, the Republican elected to fill the unexpired term of the late Edward M. Kennedy, “a guy who really let us down.”
Warren said she cares less about the truck he drives or the barn coat he wears than “about how he votes.”
Drawing her second standing ovation, she concluded by asking: “Are you ready to send Scott Brown and his pickup truck back to Wrentham?”
Warren is scheduled to speak Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., as is Menino.
“I’m headed to Charlotte after this breakfast,” the mayor said as he engaged in a call and response with the audience. “I’m just getting warmed up.”
He emphasized the importance of the November election, saying it was “about the future of America.”
Menino also alluded to Republican moves to curtail collective bargaining and said: “Boston is a union city, and we’re going to stay union.”
Many of this morning’s speakers worked the name of one Kennedy or another into their remarks, Warren among them. She listed a litany of issues the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy supported and said: “I want to go to Washington to fight for the things he fought for.”
Even Joseph Kennedy III, a candidate for the Fourth Congressional District seat that opened because of Barney Frank’s retirement, invoked a Kennedy.
Giving the last speech of the breakfast, Kennedy got one of his biggest responses by putting a spin on a famous line spoken by President John F. Kennedy, who was his great-uncle.
Kennedy said that as he watched the Republican National Convention last week, he imagined a line Romney might use in an inaugural address if he was elected:
“Ask not what your country can do for you, because now that I’m president, I’m going to make darned sure it can’t do anything.”