The Funny Senate Race in Massachusetts

[dgs49]

It is gratifying to have some humor to brighten this election season, and I'm glad it's coming from the Peoples" Republic of Mass.

The Liberal Icon Elizabeth Warren is being pilloried for her either phony or fraudulent claims of having Cherokee ancestors when applying for and serving in faculty positions at prestigious institutions of higher learning. She denies having used this sham to get hired or to gain other favorable treatment, yet she refuses to release records that would indicate whether she sought "minority" or other preference at the time of application. There is no question that she is listed in various university publications as having "minority" status.

The few who originally seemed to support her claim of Injunhood have backed off on closer examination, and even she doesn't seem to be maintaining this preposterous claim. But my God, how could this blonde-haired white woman possibly have ever encountered any discrimination on the basis of possibly being 1/32 Cherokee? This is something you joke about at a cocktail party, not put on a job application.

Ironically, she lives in a state (technically a Commonwealth) that claims to be at the forefront of bio-medical science, and her actual or lack of Amerindian heritage could be ascertained with certainty by a quick DNA test. Yet she doesn't seem to be anxious to deposit any body fluids for examination, according to what I've read. Pity.

Her actual claim to fame is that she "is not afraid of the Titans of Wall Street." Her intrepidity was most recently manifest when she bravely called for the resignation or firing of the CEO of JPMorgan after it came to light that they had made a Two Billion Dollar blunder gambling on some sort of sophisticated stock manipulation/speculation scheme.

But this is apropos. Nothing JPM did was illegal. It didn't cost the taxpayers a dime. The transactions in question had the effect of losing two billion dollars for the owners of JPM, while other investors, presumably all over the world, made a profit of two billion dollars. So what? This is the way it's supposed to work. The stockholders can fire the officers and directors of the company, they can sell their stock, and they can invest in JPM's competitors. This is not a problem requiring government intervention. This is extraordinary but perfectly legitimate economic activity. Implicitly, her injecting herself into this matter is a claim to the potential voters that if she is elected she will "do something" so that this sort of thing doesn't happen again.

Utter nonsense. It is NONE OF THE GOVERNMENT's BUSINESS, and to the extent the government meddles in it, it will make things worse, as always.

I'm not sure what the polls are saying in Massachusetts these days. Senator Brown is billing himself as a centrist because no "conservative" could ever win a statewide election in Massachusetts. Brown has indicated he will not exploit the Indian thing in his campaign, but he doesn't have to.

I hope the Republican wins.

[Lord Jim]

I find Elizabeth Warren to be just about as strident, obnoxious, and annoyingly self righteous a person as I have ever encountered on my television screen. The contrast with the affable and reasonable Mr. Brown could not be more striking.

The polls show the race to be very close, (despite Obama's 20 plus point lead at the Presidential level) I suspect in the end that Brown will probably pull it out.

There is probably no Senate race in the country where I would more like to see the GOP incumbent prevail.

[dgs49]

Another humorous item on my television screen yesterday: An Obama campaign ad stating that with Big Business matters and the American Economy to attend to, this is no time to elect someone with no experience to the Presidency.

The unstated subtext was surely something like, "See how badly things went when we tried this in 2008?!"

The BALLS of those people.

[Grim Reaper]

The BALLS of those people.

Right, by which you mean the Republicans, for trying to use birther garbage again even though it didn't work the last time?

[BoSoxGal]

Genealogist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society Chris Child set out to hunt down Warren's ancestry last Thursday. In less than a week, he discovered documents citing an 1894 marriage record that lists Warren's great-great-great grandmother, O. C. Sarah Smith as Cherokee, meaning that Warren is 1/32 nd Native American.

more

My family lore has me as 1/32 Wampanoag,which given that my Greatx7 grandfather was William Bradford who came over on the Mayflower, strikes me as not impossible. I've never verified the claim and even if I did, I would never refer to that distant DNA connection to indigenous peoples to gain a professional or academic advantage when I was raised a WASP.

I'm disappointed to hear that Warren might have, but still believe her positions would serve the interests of the Commonwealth - and the nation - better than Brown's.

[Lord Jim]

My initial reaction to this was, "Really, who cares? I can think of a hundred better reasons not to vote for Elizabeth Warren..."

But apparently this has become quite a firestorm in Massachusetts....

Once again, it's not the "crime" it's the cover up...

Will politicians EVER learn their lesson on this?

I doubt very seriously that anyone really cares whether or not Warren is 1/32 Cherokee....

Causing further heartburn for the Warren campaign, the New England Historical Genealogical Society on Tuesday reversed its claim that it possessed evidence of Warren's Cherokee heritage. Warren, who grew up in Oklahoma, says she has no documented proof of her heritage.

Trying to tie this into the "birther" nonsense is really rather silly...

The issue is that the woman has been caught in a red handed lie...(the "birther" analogy is totally inappropriate)

The best thing she could do at this point is say, "yes, I wasn't honest about it, and I deeply regret and apologize for that. There's no excuse for it. But there are much larger issues involved in this race, and if I am elected as your Senator I will fight for the people of Massachusetts and not the corporate interests that my opponent represents, blah blah blah yada yada yada..."

In other words, cop to the lie (which apparently goes back to the 80's) and then try to refocus the debate on what she sees as her "winning" issues...

I have to admit that I do get a certain amount of satisfaction in seeing this self-righteous, sanctimonious blowhard being revealed as a self promoting fraud...

But taking off my Party Hat, (and a festive hat it is) and putting on my Objective Political Analyst Hat, if I were advising the Warren campaign I would say:

"Look, you need to stop making excuses about this, admit you were wrong and put it behind you. This is bad but it's not fatal; there's still six months to the election, this a very liberal state, Brown's a tough and smart opponent but you can still have a chance to win this thing if you can get off the excuse making over this diversionary issue that calls your character into question, and make the debate about a Democrat versus a Republican and focus on your populist schtick."

Thus endeth the lesson...

[Guinevere]

I agree with the lesson, but its not really a Firestorm. It was a three-day wonder, and I haven't heard a story about it in Boston for a week or so. Pretty much everyone I know agrees she handled it badly and that Harvard should take a little of the blame as well. We all know its not bastion of diversity, no matter how much it tries to pretend differently (for that matter, the legal profession itself remains very much an old boys network, when it comes to power, position, and profit).

The NYTimes had an opinion piece on this issue today:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opini ... h_20120520

Excerpt:

The whole story has a tragicomic, Nathaniel Hawthorne meets “Curb Your Enthusiasm” feel. It’s easy to imagine Warren originally checking a box more on a whim than out of any deep determination to self-identify as Cherokee. (She didn’t use the minority-applicant program when applying to Rutgers, where she attended law school, and she identified as “white” during an early teaching job at the University of Texas.) Then it’s easy to imagine her embarrassment when the diversity wars of the 1990s made that whimsical choice something from which she couldn’t dissociate herself without intense public awkwardness. Those wars faded, she no longer listed herself as a Native American, she thought the whole thing was behind her ... until she went into politics, where no secret stays buried.

The appropriate response to such a tale is probably sympathy rather than scorn. What does deserve scorn, though, is the academic culture in which an extremely distant connection to a Cherokee ancestor ends up being touted by a law school as proof of its commitment to diversity.

A diverse faculty and campus can be a laudable goal. But the point is to build academic communities that actually contain a wide variety of experiences and perspectives, not to wax self-congratulatory because you’ve met a set of ethnic quotas. The story of Elizabeth Warren, “woman of color,” represents a reductio ad absurdum of the latter tendency, which has been all too prevalent in elite universities — giving us affirmative-action programs that benefit West Indian immigrants more than the descendants of slaves, and faculties that include a wider range of skin tones than of political and religious views.

The irony is that Warren herself probably did make Harvard more diverse, since she grew up the daughter of a janitor in Oklahoma — not a typical background, to put it mildly, for Ivy League students and faculty today. But under the academy’s cramped definitions, it was her grandfather’s Cherokee cheekbones, not her blue-collar roots, that led to her citation as a supposed trailblazer.

That isn’t a serious approach to academic diversity, and in an emerging majority-minority America (already visible in the latest Census birth statistics) where almost everyone will be 1/8 something-or-other, it will be an increasingly untenable one as well.

[Lord Jim]

faculties that include a wider range of skin tones than of political and religious views.

I am frankly astonished that The New York Times acknowledged that reality, but credit where credit is due:

[Guinevere]

Try reading it for a change, LJ, and don't let the conservative media pull the wool over your eyes

[Lord Jim]

The polls have consistently had this race in a statistical dead heat...

It will be interesting to see when the next one comes out, what if any impact this bruhaha has had....

ETA:

I read The New York Times everyday, Guin, I have home delivery.... (I'd get The Washington Post delivered too, but they don't do same day delivery out here)

I like reading The Times primarily for its international coverage; (and the Sunday Book Review) there is no other newspaper that does the kind of extensive, in depth reporting on what's going on in the rest of the world that The New York Times does...

I give them props for that....

Their reportage on US politics...not so much....

For example, they spent most of this past week trying to inflate a non-story about a Romney super PAC supposedly planning to launch a Reverend Wright ad campaign; it turns out that all this was was an unrequested proposal from an ad company (the ad company was asked to submit a proposal focusing on the economy) that the PAC rejected out of hand...

The reporting and coverage The Times did on this was atrocious, extremely unprofessional, and clearly ideologically driven.

[Guinevere]

I love the Post too -- I read it through an iPhone app, but don't have the time to get to it every day. I can barely get through the headlines of the Globe and the Times these days.

[Guinevere]

One more thing about Liz Warren that I find interesting/odd -- she has yet to really tap into the connections and fundraising capabilities of the MA women who worked so hard for Hillary and Martha raising oodles of $$ and doing all sorts of grassroots work. There have been a couple of fund raising events, but there is virtually no chatter, and no work. If this is the "quiet" phase of the campaign, it is very very quiet (and I would have heard about more) -- which isn't a good sign.

I don't love her for this job (IMNSHO she should be running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, not running for Senate), but I despise Scott Brown -- he is a hypocrite of the highest order -- and I would work for any reasonable Dem to defeat him.

[dgs49]

"...I despise Scott Brown..."

How odd that a purportedly intelligent and educated person would express such a thought for someone who is a politician, after all.

I failed to note any postings where she indicated she "despised" Terrible Ted or Barney Franks, two of the most odious characters ever to draw a government check.

Scott Brown, I am sure, is no worse than any of them...including the Warren babe, who has demonstrated nothing more than a sophomoric and vacuous distrust of any legal entity engaged in large-scale commerce, and especially those doing so with some success.