Elizabeth Warren, Banks, and the Crossroads Groups

Crossroads GPS has gone after Elizabeth Warren on her ties to the financial services industry and Occupy Wall Street. Michael Beckel writes at The Open Secrets blog:

Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies -- the conservative nonprofit advocacy group founded with assistance from GOP strategist Karl Rove -- wants you to believe that Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren is too close to Big Finance. However, last month, the group criticized her for being too close to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Warren has called Crossroads GPS' new ad “factually wrong and morally wrong.”

Who is funding these attacks? For its part, Crossroads GPS is not legally required to publicly disclose its donors, but its sister organization -- a super PAC known as American Crossroads -- is. And American Crossroads has significant ties to the finance sector and other wealthy business interests.

Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, called the pair of Crossroads GPS-produced ads some of the "least effective" ads he has seen.

"Rarely do you see such diametrically opposing attacks made by the same group within a short period of time," Sabato told OpenSecrets Blog. "Given her liberal ideology, a viewer could believe that Warren had some sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, but to make her somehow sympathetic to big bankers and Wall Street? That strains credulity."

For her part, Warren helped create the President Barack Obama's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- a new regulatory body that many finance sector interests spent heavily to oppose.