Elizabeth Warren did poorly in Iowa, despite laying claim to having built the earliest, largest, and most sophisticated field operation. The caucus vote-counting confusion provided cover for Warren to escape relatively unscathed.
But the New Hampshire results are in, and Warren got clobbered in her neighboring state, despite mostly favorable coverage nationally and her home Boston market. She lost to Bernie, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar. Now Warren can’t hide.
The massive campaign machine Warren built, reportedly with over 1000 campaign employees, could not overcome the most fundamental problem Warren’s campaign faced: Warren’s public persona of being a fake.
Americans will nominate and elect all sorts of candidates, from the virtuous to the rogue. But Americans don’t like fakes.
And there may never have been a more fake major candidate in modern American history than Elizabeth Warren.
Virtually everything about her personal narrative was false or questionable. And she couldn’t shake the “faux” prefix.
Warren was not Native American, and never identified as Native American until she was in her 30s and climbing the law professor ladder to Harvard. Yet Warren used her supposed Native American identity to juice her resume and to land on a short list of “Minority Law Teachers” in a law professor directory used in the 1980s for hiring purposes. Warren also began to identify herself to employers as Native American. Miraculously, she rose from U. Texas to U. Penn to Harvard, despite lacking the legal pedigree (fair or not) usually required for that rise. It was a total ethnic deception.
Rather than own up, Warren claimed she believed her parents about her Native American heritage. “What kid asks their grandparents for legal documentation to go along with their family stories?”, she would ask when confronted. But Warren didn’t claim to be Native American as a kid, or in college, or in law school. She never lived as a Native American or associated with Native Americans. The cover story for why she made the claim, that she believed her parents, was as fake as the claim itself.
The family lore also was highly questionable. Warren claimed that her parents had to elope because her father’s white family would not accept her Native American mother. But by the time Warren told the story publicly in her campaigns, all the people who had first-hand knowledge were dead. Contemporaneous documentation regarding her parents’ wedding called the elopement story into serious doubt.
Yet Warren defended that deception from the time it was exposed in late April 2012 until the fall of 2018, when a disastrous DNA test rollout nearly cratered her nascent presidential campaign. Only then, having spent almost 7 years defending her claim to be Native American, did Warren issue a half-hearted, non-apology apology. As fake as her claim to be Native American was, the apology was worse.
Donald Trump branded Warren “Pocahontas,” and social media called her “Fauxcahontas” and other variations. Whether you approve of those terms or not, Warren was branded as a fake, and it stuck. She couldn’t shake it no matter how hard she tried because there was a core truth to it.
Then it was a drip, drip, drip of fakery exposed.
Warren claimed her legal career outside her law teaching job was devoted to representing consumers and the downtrodden against large corporate interests. It was a core value she supposedly brought to the campaign. In fact, as revealed by me in 2012 and confirmed by The Washington Post and others in 2019, Warren represented large corporations such as Dow Chemical against consumers, and made millions doing so.
Warren claimed she was fired as a school teacher because she was visibly pregnant. Contemporanous documentation disproved that claim.
Warren claimed her father was a janitor, to give herself some sort of street cred, but her brother disputed that characterization.
Warren claimed she was sexually harassed when she was a young professor by an elderly professor, but that’s not how she originally described the encounter.
Warren started her presidential run branded a fake Indian, and ended it branded a general fake. A general fake who lectured everyone else that she had a plan for everything. But her central plan, Medicare for All, had a math problem. As in, the math didn’t add up, so she backed off. A faker whose central plan was no plan at all had no chance.
Medicare for All was the blow that struck down Warren’s poll rise, but it took place against a public distrust of almost anything Warren said.
Warren said she was the person who could implement large, structural change in our country. Yet her rhetoric became increasingly totalitatarian, with promises to imprison or at least fire all manner of people.
And in the end, Warren couldn’t manage even her own large campaign behemoth. Yet Warren demanded the nation to entrust her with building an even larger federal government behemoth than we already have.
No amount of money could change Elizabeth Warren’s brand. No number of consultants and campaign staff could change Warren’s brand.
Warren was a faker. America doesn’t want a faker. New Hampshire killed her campaign. The Elizabeth Warren campaign epitah will be: “She tried to fake it, but American didn’t buy it.”
Warren’s campaign obituary has been written. It’s only a matter of time before her campaign capitulates to reality.
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