OK, I’m going to retract that after doing a little research. I was giving her the benefit of the doubt based on the Snopes article and the possibility that the schools took some information from her and ran a little too fast with it. But it looks like she did the running herself. From the Boston Globe back in 2012:
My apologies. I suppose there is the glimmer of a possibility that she said “part Native American” or something like that, but I think it’s fair to go by the reporting of the Globe as is.
At worst, she told a little white lie. Beto O’Rourke had a DUI when he was almost still a kid. Most of us wouldn’t want to be judged by our worst day.
Contrast Warren’s innocuous “lie” — if you insist on calling it that — with Trump’s entire life. His business and political careers are both based on fraud, perjury, crime and even treason. Yet look where attention focuses.
Alas, and woe! No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too-
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out-
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon.
Well, my first thought is that there is essentially no chance at all that Warren loses this Senate seat, or comes close to doing so, regardless of how many mistakes she makes; and when all is said and done I think I will probably return to that conclusion.
But I have posted on these boards before about campaigning for Martha Coakley in 2010*, when she was running for that very seat against Scott Brown…and singlehandedly took a thirty-point lead in the polls down to a pretty significant loss in the space of just a few weeks. Now, I think Coakley was an outlier for a bunch of reasons, and I doubt that Warren, with all her accomplishments, her incumbency, etc., follows in those footsteps. To be fair, though, I guess it could happen…MA voters have been known in the very recent past to turn on a Dem Senate candidate very suddenly.
[*Summary: Never, in all my campaigns, have I seen such apathy among people who should have liked her. Never have I heard so many excuses about why they might not make it to vote… Or, as one liflong Democrat who decided to vote for Brown said, “She thinks that seat belongs to her.”]
That aside, though, whoa what a dumb thing for Warren to do, at least from where I sit:
–It’s not going to stop the insults from Trump and Trumpians. Why should it? They’ve never cared about whether something is true.
–The fact that she did the DNA test suggests that she is easily bullied by Trump. Not a good thing, to show that this matters so much to her.
–The whole “I’m part NA” thing has never been a good look for Warren. Even if her job offer had nothing to do with this heritage, she must have known what her employer would do with the information. Even if she did not benefit from being in a “Minority Law Teacher” group, it looks bad for her to claim membership. At the very best it looks like a white woman inordinately proud of a small sliver of her heritage, which is…not really the kind of thing you should want to keep in the public eye. At worst, it looks like a cynical attempt to game the system, which is…REALLY not the kind of thing you should want to keep in the public eye. This is the sort of thing you should let lie.
–Even if it’s 1/64th and not 1/256th or 1/1024th…no one cares. “See! I was right! I AM the only left-handed person in my whole class!” This is just not worth spending time on, even if people were actually able to win an occasional pissing contest with Trump.
–And finally it seems that she has done some serious harm to herself with actual NA groups, and if that’s the case she deserves it IMHO. It shouldn’t be a surprise that actual Native Americans might see their heritage as something significant, something related to culture, and frown on using it as a parlor game for scoring political points against a terrible president.
I really wonder what she thought was going to happen!
Anyway. Seems like a truly bad misjudgment, and I think a completely unforced error. I’m sure it won’t be fatal to either campaign (Sen 2018 or Pres 2020), but for me anyway it sure doesn’t move her up in a crowded presidential field.
It’s really not hard to understand once you throw away your boxed set of the “West Wing,” and realize Democrats will never fact check their way to victory. Republicans do not act in good faith and the only difference between Trumpers and other Republicans is that they feel emboldened enough to let their masks slip off.
I am not partisan in that way, I’m very neutral. I have no preconceived narratives such as you describe. I just think its interesting how Asahi is prescient at times despite (maybe perhaps because of) his strong opinions.
All asahi said was “Warren totally fell for a troll” so I really don’t get what’s prescient about that, given that it’s already happened and not exactly a groundbreaking observation.
That may or may not be deserved, but I don’t see how it could have been brought about by the test. The test was not about whether she had Indian culture, it was about whether she had Native American ancestry, and it’s pretty clear she does. I don’t really think it’s cricket to classify it as “trying to score political points” when you’re simply defending yourself against accusations that you lied.
Yeah, honestly this isn’t really a great outcome. Back in the 80’s-90’s it was socially acceptable to call yourself 1/64th Cherokee, as if that meant something. Even if you can prove this fact, it’s not a fact that means much of anything to anyone.
Then there’s the fact that if we look at the methodology of the test, all it can really say is “are you related to an indigenous person in the Western Hemisphere within 6-10 generations?” I believe Warren’s test is proof of that, but again, where’s the victory in proving that you’re 1/64th (or whatever) Native American?
If she ever did use this to present herself as “Native American”, I would categorize that under things that are really unfortunate but commonly accepted in the 1990s.
So, all she actually said was that she has “Native American heritage”? Heck, I have that, too. I won’t claim that I have very much of it (much less than I have of Irish, German, and Italian heritage), but yeah, I have a little.
The happy news in all of this is that an early American effort in genocide failed spectacularly, Cherokee blood flows in our mainstream. Suck on that while you roast in Hell, Andy Jackson!
Well, let me put it this way: up until yesterday I’d never heard of any Native American group calling out Warren for any reason. Now I’ve read about several who have. So it sure seems as though the testing was the trigger.
Which to me makes sense. Her desire to do the test does not seem to be motivated by anything other than “see? I was right!” Which as I pointed out seems especially kind of silly when the amount of NA blood is so tiny.
It’s about her, not about “being NA,” and I believe that’s what the responses are about.
And in that sense, yes, I do think it’s deserved.
Honestly, if I had gotten those results, I would have thrown them in the shredder immediately. I fail to see how releasing this helped her at all. Bad timing, too.
Also, at least one Cherokee leader slammed her for apparently putting too much trust in this test… the leader said she thinks it proves she’s Cherokee, when his contention is that it can’t even distinguish between North American and South American. Whether he’s right or not, whether she said it or not, I couldn’t say…but if that’s the case that’s another reason why the test itself would indeed be a problem!
Did that Cherokee leader say where he got the “can’t tell a South American Indian from a North American Indian” point? The guy who did the analysis, his claim to fame is tracking population movements through genetic markers.
Apparently, and I don’t understand this, the Cherokee Nation don’t want their DNA on file, and discourage their people from giving their DNA to companies that compare it. Senator Warren’s DNA was compared to South Americans because that’s what was available.
As I understand it, she may be descended from Leni Lenape as much as Cherokee anyway.
The thing is, Betsy Warren is like a lot of us. Mostly descended from invaders, but with the sense that someone back in the line was an Indian. It’s a contrast to those who considered Indians subhuman and passed anti-miscegenation laws. I can understand where Warren’s coming from; I’m tempted to get my DNA tested now.
I’ve been reading this thread with interest, because most of you are reacting to this news the opposite way I did.
Hindsight’s 20/20. Going in, there was no way either you or Warren knew what was going to happen.
What the DNA-test gaffe has ended up doing is open Warren up to attacks from the left. She’s now being taken to task by Native Americans for her perceived failure to support them during Standing Rock (especially when compared with Bernie Sanders). Native Americans and activists are a large part of the base that Warren must attract in order to get the nomination and Standing Rock is an important issue to them. Combined with her handling with the DNA-test, Warren may have inadvertently alienated this segment to such a degree she may be considered a too divisive figure among liberals to get the Democratic nomination in 2020.
What makes you think Native Americans are a large part of any base constituency? There’s less than 5 million eligible voters, even fewer registered and have the about the lowest turnout of any demographic. That’s not a good thing but it’s a real thing.
The problem with looking for north American NA DNA markers is a dearth of data. To address that, researches use DNA from Central and South American sources. That’s probably the source of that issue. Also, some commercial DNA anlysis companies will call out “East Asian or Native American” when looking at folks who are mostly European. The signals, apparently, are sometimes difficult to tell apart due to the relatively close relationship between those 2 populations as compared to Europeans.