'I come in not just to be a senator, c’mon, that’s not what this is really about,' Warren said Warren: 'I'll work with anyone'

Elizabeth Warren, whose status as a liberal icon helped her raise a record-setting amount in her successful effort to unseat Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, on Wednesday sounded a bipartisan note the day after her victory.

“I come in not just to be a senator, c’mon, that’s not what this is really about,” Warren said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I come there for all the people who said ‘Look, this country has got to work for us.’ Working people, for the carpenters, for the teachers, for all the people who said ‘We’re out there, we work hard, we play by the rules, we just want a chance. We just want a chance to build a little economic security.”


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She added, “We’re willing to pull tighter on our belts if we feel like we’re building a future for our kids.’”

Warren, a Harvard Law professor who helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, raised more than $40 million. She won 54 percent of the vote versus Brown, who made bipartisanship and independence the center of his political identity in the heavily liberal state. But Warren emphasized she was willing to work with Republicans.

On CBS’s “This Morning,” she explicitly acknowledged Brown’s appeal and pledged to reach out to his supporters.

“People who voted for Senator Brown, I think a lot of them were saying: ‘You got to be willing to reach across the aisle,’” Warren said. “And I want them to know I heard them loud and clear, and it’s what I want to do. … I want to go to Washington because I want to help get something done.”

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“This isn’t about party,” Warren said. “I’ll work with anyone, and I really do mean that. Democrat, Republican, independent, Libertarian, contrarian, vegetarian, I don’t care.”

“That’s a big tent,” host Joe Scarborough quipped.

Warren also celebrated the record number of women elected to the Senate in 2012. The upper chamber will contain at least 18 female members. The previous record was 17. When CBS host Norah O’Donnell first presented the statistic to Warren, the senator-elect joked: “Hubba Hubba.”

“You know, it’s time,” Warren continued. “C’mon. There was still this year, a big debate over equal pay for equal work? No. It’s time. It’s time.”