As one of my less savory duties for LI readers, I get to watch things like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) formally announce her 2020 presidential campaign. As we like to say, I watch, so you don’t have to . . . though you can, of course—the video is embedded below.
There were many interesting things about her Saturday announcement, but perhaps the most interesting didn’t take place in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but in the media coverage of her announcement. Even in Warren-friendly publications, the weight of her questionably-motivated presentation of herself as a Native American throughout her career hangs in the air around her like an albatross carcass, stinking up even her proudest moment as she announces her run for the Democrat nomination for president.
I logged in to the live coverage of the Warren announcement event just in time to hear Representative Joe Kennedy III (D-MA) zombie-walk through his introduction of her. A couple of things struck me as I watched him squirm uncomfortably in front of the friendly audience:
At one point he introduces Warren as if he expects her to enter the stage. She does not. The Washington Examiner is reporting that she was late to her own event and that people began leaving early.
Furthermore, Kennedy III was the wrong person to trot out as her introductory speaker in Lawrence, MA, where the theme was the working man, the downtrodden worker who needs Warren to swoop in and save him. Is there a more elite and privileged white male in America than a Kennedy? The family most likely to be dubbed “American royalty”?
The other thing that struck me was the tone-deafness here, the Warren campaign is launching not a campaign for Senate, where a Kennedy in Massachusetts matters, but she is launching a national campaign for president . . . and most Kennedy-supporting Americans outside Massachusetts are, like JFK, anti-communist—anti-everything, in other words, that Warren stands for. JFK cut taxes on “the rich,” and he loathed the very idea of “spreading the wealth” as a means of any kind of “justice.” And we can’t even begin to imagine the aristocratic ridicule he would heap on the cow-fart-banning, economy-destroying, laughably cartoonish New Green Deal Warren has embraced.
I was a bit uncomfortable in a few places where she was clearly attempting to be more likable and more appealing to we “common people” whom she clearly deplores. She kept referring to her father as her “Daddy” who was, she kept repeating, a janitor. There’s nothing wrong with a grown woman calling her father “Daddy,” but it’s not very common for a grown woman to speak of her father in those terms in a general sense (i.e. when not directly addressing him or a family member). It just felt contrived, particularly when it became a refrain.
She also kept speaking about “the rich” as if she weren’t “one of them.” I kept flashing back to her strategic presser in front of her garage (to hide her multi-million dollar home) and thinking, who does she think she’s fooling? She drinks beer from the bottle, she calls her (janitor, did she mention that he was a janitor? A janitor!) father “Daddy,” and she rails against “those rich people.” She must be one of us!
During her brief speech, she flogged every socialist dead horse, trotted out every Trotskyite cliche, and portrayed herself as chock-full of presidential gravitas . . . if you like your “she persisted” “presidential” gravitas angry, bitter, and overly shrill.
Watch the whole event (feel free to click forward to Kennedy at around 40:00):
More interesting—to me, anyway—than her formal 2020 Democrat presidential run announcement was what she didn’t mention at all . . . but the media did by the scores: her Native American problem.
For example, Reuters published an article (originally) entitled “Senator Warren Seeks To Quiet Critics With 2020 Campaign Launch.” It’s now entitled, “Senator Warren launches 2020 campaign, sounds note of economic equality,” but you can still see the original title in the url: .https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election/senator-warren-seeks-to-quiet-critics-with-2020-campaign-launch-idUSKCN1PY08J
As a heads up, Reuters was one of the few news services that I still remotely trusted. Silly me.
The New York Times published a glowing piece about the Warren announcement and candidacy, but even they couldn’t . . . not mention her Native American problem.
Her announcement comes as she seeks to establish herself in the race as a champion of liberal policy, like her newly proposed wealth tax, but also as she continues to face questions about her claims to Native American ancestry and her sometimes- awkward attempts to settle the issue.
Questions about Ms. Warren’s ancestry first arose in 2012, when she was running for the U.S. Senate against Republican Scott Brown and it became widely known that she had identified herself as Native American during her early career as a lawyer and law professor. Ms. Warren has said that family lore held that her maternal ancestors included members of the Cherokee and Delaware tribes.
Although there is no evidence that claiming Native American identity helped her professionally, the matter has dogged her throughout her political career. Mr. Trump has long branded her with the slur “Pocahontas,” suggesting that she made up a minority identity.
Even CNN had to mention the Warren Native American controversy, though they spun it as best they could.
But even as Warren sharpens her policy positions and political message, the specter of additional, previously undisclosed examples of Warren labeling herself Native American on professional forms looms in the background. Warren did not address the potential for another distracting revelation when asked by reporters on Capitol Hill this week.Another unanswered question: whether the dust-ups will permanently undermine Warren’s campaign. Tribal activists, who were sharply critical over DNA test and earlier refusal to address the harm it might have done to their interests, have mostly welcomed her apologies.
Try as she might, she will never be able to escape her fraud. You can’t claim on a Texas State Bar registration to be a Native American, admit that there other such documents out there that have yet to drop, and think that you can magic away the horrible implications of this cynical ploy.
A ploy, it must be added, she has ridden to professional success, and denied (and tacitly blamed Harvard Law for) for years, while pretending in her announcement speech that she is the embodiment of the American Dream.
She’s substituted playing the SJW system of rewarding minorities for being minorities to get ahead for individual accomplishment and pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps. Getting ahead via telling untruths, by misrepresenting oneself to best play a rigged system is not, and hopefully will never be, the American way or the path to the American Dream.
President Trump also weighed-in prior to her formal announcement.
President Trump’s campaign wasted no time going after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Saturday shortly before she was expected to formally announce her candidacy for the White House in 2020.“Elizabeth Warren has already been exposed as a fraud by the Native Americans she impersonated and disrespected to advance her professional career, and the people of Massachusetts she deceived to get elected,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement.“The American people will reject her dishonest campaign and socialist ideas like the Green New Deal, that will raise taxes, kill jobs and crush America’s middle-class. Only under President Trump’s leadership will America continue to grow safer, secure and more prosperous,” he added.
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