This is getting comical. To recap: Warren — who might be 1/32 Cherokee — says she classified herself as “Native American” in 1986 in hopes of being invited to attend a “luncheon” comprised of people “who are like I am.” She proceeded to renew her ethnic self-identification for the next nine years, then finally stopped checking that box in 1995, for no apparent reason. The fact that she just happened to have secured tenure from Harvard by that point is irrelevant, she says. It now looks like there’s a very reasonable chance that Harvard was still listing Warren as its lone Native American law professor as recently as 2011, as part of a “diversity census report.” Harvard nor Warren will deny that inference, which doesn’t consitute a confirmation, but it’s pretty damn close. So it seems that Harvard, which we know touted Warren’s supposed heritage on at least two occasions, has continued doing so for more than a decade beyond the point that even she gave it up. It looks like they did it for the high privilege of checking certain “diversity” boxes of their own. Shouldn’t this cast further doubt on their insistence that Warren’s, ahem, Native Americanness never, ever came up during her hiring and promotion processes? This trainwreck is damaging Warren’s credibility because she’s not fooling anyone, including her fellow Democrats:
Elizabeth Warren’s stumbling efforts to douse the firestorm surrounding her claims of being a Native American minority have raised concerns among local and national Democrats who are questioning her campaign’s competence. “There’s nobody watching this that doesn’t think she’s in big trouble,” one well-known Massachusetts Democrat said. Joe Trippi, a prominent national Democratic consultant, told the Herald that while Warren has time to recover, the campaign should have anticipated this issue would surface. “The problem is they weren’t ready for something they should have been ahead of,” Trippi said.
“This takes her biography into a bizarre dimension,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It has derailed the effort to define Warren in a voter-friendly way.” Sabato also said that Warren’s claim that she didn’t list herself as a minority to gain an employment advantage is not believable. “This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious she was using (the minority listing) for career advancement.”