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 withNative 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.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. CNN Correspondent: Warren Is Struggling to Stay Relevant.
A CNN correspondent said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) is struggling to stay relevant in New Hampshire as primary voting is underway in the state.
“For Elizabeth Warren, it’s been a struggle to really remain relevant, frankly. She has had a hard time building a level of support she expected, being someone from nearby Massachusetts,” Ryan Nobles said during a report from the state Tuesday morning.
He also said that Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) have taken different approaches to criticize their fellow Democratic presidential candidates.
“Sanders [is] not afraid to go after who he right now views as his chief rival in Pete Buttigieg, hammering his donor base, suggesting that it would influence his presidency,” Nobles said, “while Warren, even though she’s struggling in the polls right now, continues to remain above the fray, arguing that what the Democrats need to beat Donald Trump is a unity candidate. Even though she’s struggling at this point, she’s not trying to bring down her other opponents.”