Senate hopeful: Liz checks box for ‘self-aggrandizing’ pattern
He won’t call her “Pocohantas,” but Republican Senate hopeful John Kingston says Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry call into question her credibility and are part of a “self-aggrandizing” pattern.
Kingston, in an interview on Boston Herald Radio, said Trump used the wrong time — a Navajo war heroes ceremony — to pick on Warren, but added that voters should judge Warren for listing herself as a Native American minority in a law school directory.
“Senator Warren, for her own part, is going to have to live with that and the implications (of that) all her days,” Kingston said yesterday on the “Battenfeld” show. “It’s an issue on the voters’ minds of credibility.”
Kingston, one of three 2018 GOP challengers to Warren, was harshly critical of the Democratic senator, also challenging her claims of being sexually harassed by a law school professor and saying it showed a pattern of her exaggerating her record.
“We honor and respect Native Americans ... we honor and respect victims of sexual assault, and so people sense that when that’s been co-opted and used in other ways, it just doesn’t feel right to them,” Kingston said.
The Winchester businessman, making his first run for elective office, also blasted Warren for failing to call for Sen. Al Franken to resign in the wake of sexual harassment charges against him. And he chided Warren for being a “divisive” figure who puts “politics over people.”
“She brings the worst of Washington’s ugliness here to the state of Massachusetts,” he said.
Kingston is running as an “independent” minded conservative, but has come under criticism from some Republicans for abandoning the party after the nomination of President Trump last year, then rejoining the GOP in time for his U.S. Senate campaign.
Kingston was one of the leaders of the “Stop Trump” movement in 2016, calling Trump and Hillary Clinton “Evil No. 1 ... and slightly less evil No. 2.” He also led an abortive campaign for a third party candidate.
But in the interview yesterday, Kingston sharply downplayed his differences with Trump, noting that he attended the presidential Inauguration and saying he was “in favor of many, many things happening” in the Trump administration, including tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks and judicial appointments.
Kingston also defended his decision to make his opening campaign speech at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, saying it was not meant as an endorsement of the Democratic senator.
“We wanted to say to everybody in the state right out of the box that we’re going to go anywhere. We’re going to go to (Democrats’) home turf,” Kingston said, adding: “If I were going to talk about someone who was an inspiring Kennedy, it would be John Kennedy.”
Kingston’s Republican opponents include state Rep. Geoff Diehl, who was state campaign chairman for Trump, and Beth Lindstrom, former campaign manager for ex-Sen. Scott Brown.