Susan Davis, USA TODAY

7:02PM EST October 10. 2012 – BOSTON— Surrounded by firefighters supporting her campaign, Elizabeth Warren stood on a street corner in South Boston and hit at Republican Sen. Scott Brown where it hurts. His pickup truck.

“It’s not about what truck you drive,” the Democratic candidate said, reiterating a popular sound bite dismissing Brown’s storied truck. The vehicle has featured prominently in Brown’s two Senate campaigns as a symbol of his ability to relate to the state’s working-class voters who helped elect him. “I’m in this race because I believe in working families,” she said.

Brown lobbed his own offensive at Warren a day earlier outside of Boston’s South Station, casting her as a “hired gun” for corporate interests, following media reports about her previous legal work in the 1990s, when she assisted a steel company in a fight over making payments into a health care fund for retired coal miners. “That’s an issue of honesty and character,” Brown said, trying to undermine Warren’s image as a consumer advocate.

The brawling, personal nature of the Massachusetts race has intensified in the closing weeks of a campaign that could decide control of the Senate. Warren and Brown are competing intensely for working-class voters in very blue Massachusetts who helped Brown win a surprise 2010 special election to replace the late Democratic icon, Ted Kennedy.

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