Wall Street vs. Elizabeth Warren, Round 2012

She hasn’t yet come close to wrapping up her party’s nomination to take on Republican Senator Scott Brown, but consumer champion and Wall Street nemesis Elizabeth Warren had better watch out:

“The potential Brown-Warren matchup is on everyone’s radar,” said Scott Talbot, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable.

On the Washington cocktail circuit, banking lobbyists are chattering about how to take Warren on. They fear that a massive, public money assault might be more of a gift than a challenge for the Harvard Law School professor who built her reputation taking on big banks.

The powerful lobby is in wait-and-see mode, weighing its options as it plots a strategy designed to hit hard, but smart.

“You don’t want to make her sympathetic by landing on her with both feet,” said a financial services industry insider and former GOP Senate aide.

Warren’s problem is not that she won’t excite the base and bring out the faithful, but that Brown has actually voted like a moderate Republican (and in favor of the Dodd-Frank bill she has been integral in enforcing, most notably). She’ll need to nonetheless make him out to be a pawn of the industry and someone who went to Washington and got too close, too fast to banking lobbyists.