Liz Warren owes apology to Mass. voters
It’s just fine that Elizabeth Warren apologized to the Cherokees for falsely claiming to be one of them.
It might be helpful if she also apologizes to the people of Massachusetts. She could have done it Saturday when she made her presidential campaign official, but she didn’t. Instead she reworked and expanded her attack on wealthy Americans who, she said, are not paying their fair share.
Massachusetts is not Virginia, where Gov. Ralph Northam, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and Attorney General Mark Herring, all Democrats, are all caught up in scandals of blackface and sexual harassment charges. And while none of them are running for president, all three have issued some sort of an apology to the people of Virginia. Warren should do the same to the people of Massachusetts. After all, it was the Massachusetts voters whom Warren led, or conned, into believing she was descended from Native Americans — namely the Cherokees and Delaware tribes — when it was not true.
What is true is the mounting pile of evidence that shows she used her false Native American narrative to advance her career. Why else would a person claim to be Native American on documents or list themselves as Cherokee elsewhere if not to gain favor in the academic world as a disadvantaged and deserving minority? Anyone who’s been around knows that there are more phonies in academia than there are in politics.
Warren’s already shaky heritage story was further blown apart last week when The Washington Post printed a copy of her registration card filed with the Texas State Bar in 1986. On the card, Warren, then 36, white and blue-eyed, wrote that she was “American Indian” in the space that asked the applicant’s race. She is nothing of the sort. Her DNA test showed that she has less Native American ancestry than your average American, with no traces of any Cherokee or Delaware connection.
But her scam worked as she climbed the academic ladder to a perch at Harvard. She could have quietly continued her teaching career as a “minority” hire had she not decided to run for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown in 2012. Contrary to reports, Brown did not first bring up Warren’s dubious ancestry claims. Nor did President Trump initially mock her as Pocahontas.
The Boston Herald broke the story of Warren’s alleged “minority” status at Harvard in the summer of 2012. She was first called “Pocahontas” by Herald columnist and radio talk host Howie Carr. I referred to her as “Professor Pocahontas” in a Lowell Sun column that ran May 1, 2012, under the headline, “Warren’s cashing in with her ancestry.”
This was four years before Trump, whom Warren called racist over the issue, even began his campaign for president. But no matter. The words “racist” and “racism” have been so devalued by progressives that the words have lost their original and powerful meaning.
Progressives call everyone who disagrees with them “racist.” Warren succeeded in playing identity politics for a long time, making her way as a Native American through the University of Pennsylvania and finally Harvard. Now she is trapped with a story of family lore that does not stand up to scrutiny.
Her problems on the campaign trail will mount. Fellow Democratic candidates will have her on the defensive by challenging her everchanging Native American story. The opposition research on Warren is well underway. Warren was fortunate during her last swing through Iowa in January that nobody in the media looked too closely at her itinerary. She made a campaign appearance in Storm Lake, a town in western Iowa. Storm Lake is located — truly — between two other small towns called Cherokee and Pocahontas. Warren’s presidential campaign this time took her to seven states including Iowa. This time she did not revisit Storm Lake or go anywhere near it.
Warren can talk all she wants about the progressive issues she is running on. But what most people want is a truthful and transparent explanation why she held herself up to be Native American when she was not.
Before embarking on her campaign swing to the seven states she was scheduled to visit, Warren should first have visited seven Massachusetts cities where she could have apologized for misleading the voters over her identity all these years.