Elizabeth Warren appeared yesterday on the Jim and Margery radio show in Boston.
There were two significant points raised regarding the Cherokee controversy.
First, Warren denied that the controversy and the demand even by Democratic Native Americans to meet with her is a problem for her campaign (at 0:25 of audio embedded below):
Q. … these Native American Democrats, like so many others, don’t believe your denials. This continues to be a huge problem for you, doesn’t it?A. Well, you know, I don’t think so, um, it’s been pretty clear all along, I know what my mother told me and I know what our family grew up with, uh, but I think what matters most now in this election is what are we going to do for the families here in Massachusetts ….
The whole world understands that the Cherokee issue is a problem, yet Warren persists in the alternative universe that it’s not.
The questioning, while well intentioned, missed the point that all reporters have missed. The issue is not whether Warren obtained a benefit, which is what Warren wants to focus on but as to which she refuses to release employment-related records. Rather, the issue is whether Warren tried to obtain a benefit she did not deserve, which she undoubtedly did.
Second, and perhaps most important, Warren defended herself by asserting that she has released her college and law school applications (question starting at 1:15, quote at 1:45):
“People have seen my college applications, my law school applications … “
(Full audio here, excerpt below.)
Really?
If Warren released her college and law school applications, that would be news to me. As closely as I have followed Warren’s bobbing and weaving explanations, I’ve yet to see and am unable to find her college and law school applications.
Maybe I’ve missed something. If anyone can find copies of the Warren’s college and law school applications, please post the link in the comments.
Or maybe, listening to her wording very carefully, it depends on what the meaning of “people have seen” is.
Update: A reader emails a link to an AP report as to Warren’s student application to Rutgers Law School: “Records show Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren identified her race as “white” on an employment record at the University of Texas and declined to apply for admission to Rutgers Law School under a program for minority students. The records were obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday. ”
The AP report does not address Warren’s college application, which she references in her statement. AP also does not identify the document it saw as to the Rutgers law “program for minority students,” so we don’t know if it was Warren’s application or some other document. Also, failing to apply for a minority program is not the same thing as how she self-identified. As the article further notes, “Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown has called on Warren to release all law school applications and personnel files from the universities where she taught,” none of which have been disclosed.
Warren is in an obvious bind. If Warren didn’t self-identify as Native American when she was younger and supposedly took at face value the strong family lore, why did she begin doing so as a law professor in the mid-1980s?
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