Elizabeth Warren: A little bit Cherokee

Just call her “Fauxcahontas,” said Mark Steyn in NationalReview.com. The already colorful Senate race in Massachusetts between Elizabeth Warren and Republican incumbent Scott Brown got a new jolt of life last week with the news that Warren has spent “much of her adult life” claiming to be a Native American. Warren, at most, is 1/32 Cherokee, but she says her grandfather had “high cheekbones”—and that was evidently enough for this pale-faced liberal champion to list herself in a directory of “minority” law professors, and for Harvard Law School to tout her employment as evidence of its “diverse” faculty. This “knee-slapper” raises some serious questions, said Michael Graham in the Boston Herald. Did Warren’s “self-promoting smoke signals” lead Harvard Law to make her an affirmative-action hire? When she came to the school, her résumé was lacking the typical Ivy League credentials.

The idea that Warren was unqualified is “ridiculous on its face,” said Joe Klein in Time.com. Warren became a “brilliant and very popular” professor at Harvard, one whose dazzling ability to elucidate the complexities of law and economics has made her a national consumer advocate and rising star in the Democratic Party. Admittedly, Warren’s explanation for why she listed herself as “Native American”—the hope that it might help her meet “people who are like I am”—is silly. But a single check mark on a form from the 1990s “should have absolutely no impact on this campaign.” Warren identifying as Cherokee isn’t ridiculous at all, said Sarah Burris in Politico.com. In Oklahoma, where both she and I were born, most folks have traces of Native American heritage, and we “all grow up there hearing about which tribe or tribes we belong to.” Indeed, the current chief of the Cherokee tribe is himself only 1/32 Cherokee.

Still, this flap will hurt Warren, said Steve Kornacki in Salon.com. Scott Brown’s best chance of beating Warren in historically Democratic Massachusetts is to “maximize the cultural distance” between the Ivy League professor and the state’s blue-collar voters, who react very negatively to even the merest whiff of affirmative action. As well they should, said Michael Barone in RealClearPolitics.com. Is there a better illustration of the absurdity of racial preferences than the “idea that the blonde, blue-eyed Elizabeth Warren suffered some terrible disadvantage” because of her undetectable Cherokee heritage? It’s “laugh-out-loud funny”—but less so if you’ve been turned down for a job because you’re white.

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