Elizabeth Warren Had to Engage With This Nonsense. That's What Our Politics Have Become.
Yes, I am very sorry that our politics is in such a degraded state that it was even necessary for Senator Professor Warren to jump through this particular hoop. After all, the whole thing has been a buffoonish smear from the start, and it hasn't even been that much of a drawback to her political success. Scott Brown leaned heavily on the whole "fake Indian" thing in 2012, and all that did was make Senator McDreamy look like a dick. From The Boston Globe:
Warren, whose claims to Native American blood have been mocked by President Trump and other Republicans, provided the test results to the Globe on Sunday in an effort to defuse questions about her ancestry that have persisted for years. She planned an elaborate rollout Monday of the results as she aimed for widespread attention. The analysis of Warren’s DNA was done by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship, also known as a genius grant, for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis.
He concluded that “the vast majority” of Warren’s ancestry is European, but he added that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.” Bustamante calculated that Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” That timing fits Warren’s family lore, passed down during her Oklahoma upbringing, that her great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was at least partially Native American.
This conforms to what's been told to me by practically every native-born Oklahoman I've ever met. But that's beside the point. If it had been me, I'd have told the president* to pound sand until he released his tax returns. This is further evidence that I never will be elected to anything, ever.
What makes SPW's announcement different is the video that comes with it. Not only does the video convincingly make the case that a) SPW had ancestors who were Native Americans and, b) that SPW did not depend on this to advance her career-something that the Globe had run down exhaustively in an earlier story-it also introduces her and her family to the public at large in a very shrewd and entertaining way. You get Momma and Daddy. You get her three big brothers talking about "Betsy." You get a nephew with a fabulous beard, and a family dog, snoozing away on the carpet. There are old family photos, being Ken Burns'ed at precise intervals.
My family (including Fox News-watchers) sat together and talked about what they think of @realDonaldTrump’s attacks on our heritage. And yes, a famous geneticist analyzed my DNA and concluded that it contains Native American ancestry. pic.twitter.com/r3SNzP22f8
- Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) October 15, 2018
At the same time, you get testimonial after testimonial about her gifts as a teacher. (When you have Charles Fried, who was Ronald Reagan's Solicitor General, and who is no flaming liberal, god knows, calling you "a tremendous teacher, an important scholar," you can't do much better as far as a bipartisan reference goes.) And the clearly political elements in the video, about how the president* uses Native Americans as a punchline, are more effective for having been grounded in her professional and personal story. The video reminds me of nothing more than it does that introductory video from Bernie Sanders's campaign in 2016, the one that used Paul Simon's "America" so effectively.
Of course, there has been idiot pushback. Kellyanne Conway was on TV Monday, frothing about "junk science." And there also is this little Buzzfeed homily from the pulpit of the Church of the Savvy.
Democratic voters got an early sense of this when they woke up Monday morning to a slickly-produced video from Elizabeth Warren about her DNA. The first 19 words in the video are spoken, sneeringly, by Donald Trump. The rest of the video answers a question Donald Trump raised, takes a piece of bait he’d laid out and Warren furiously, seeing no other option, took as a symbol of her willingness to “fight.” The video is, most of all, the strongest Democratic candidate, thinking first of how to win the Democratic nomination, engaging entirely on absurd, racist terms laid out by the president of the United States. Might as well deal with it now, the logic goes; Obama eventually submitted to the grotesque ritual of releasing his birth certificate in person to the White House press.
First of all, the president* didn't raise this question. Scott Brown and a passel of wingnut bloggers did. Second, does this video look like SPW is doing anything "furiously"? There's a dog sleeping on the carpet, for pity's sake. Third, the idea that it somehow would have been more politically advantageous not to have "engaged" on this, which Smith seems to be implying, though he doesn't say it outright, because who the hell knows what he really thinks in this piece, is belied by 30 years of conservative campaigning. How'd it work out for John Kerry? For Hillary Clinton? Contrarianism is a helluva drug.
So, yes, I wish we were in a place where none of this was necessary. But we're not, and it was, and there was no better way to handle it-and, yes, introduce yourself as a national candidate-than the way this video does. She's in it for real. And Donald Trump, that notorious chiseler, owes her a million bucks.
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