Fauxcahontas

Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat candidate for Senate in Massachusetts and opposing Republican incumbent Scott Brown, is ignoring the first rule of hole digging over the kerfuffle around her use and claim of minority status by the basis of an unproven 3% link and possessing high cheekbones to being a Native American.

She's still digging at the hole trying to both justify the claim and obfuscate it as it looks to derail her campaign to unseat Scott Brown.

She has listed herself as a 'Native American' apparently in an effort to not, in her words, advance her career leveraging affirmative action and minority hiring, but to 'meet people like me'.  But there is a lot of speculation and evidence that her self-description as a Native American on the basis of her high cheekbones and family stories that a great-great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee (which hasn't been officially substantiated) was a case of using the claimed ethnic heritage as a tool to move herself to the front of the line.

The Boston Herald asked a very simple question to Elizabeth Warren, her campaign, and Harvard Law School - which has promoted the fact that they have a single Native American faculty member on staff in their diversity census reports....

This question has gone unanswered by all parties...but like many non-answers, it speaks volumes...

Harvard Law School lists one lone Native American faculty member on its latest diversity census report — but school officials and campaign aides for Elizabeth Warren refused to say yesterday whether it refers to the Democratic Senate candidate … The 2011 report indicates that “Race/Ethnicity designations are from self-report data,” meaning whoever is listed as a Native American told the school of their tribal lineage.


Robert C. Clark, a professor and former Harvard Law School dean, is listed as part Choctaw in a 1999 Harvard Magazine article. Clark has worked for the law school since 1989 but wasn’t named in a 1996 Harvard Crimson article when law school officials sought to defend their minority hires. Clark did not return requests for comment. Former law school spokesman Mike Chmura said in the 1996 article that out of 71 professors, only one was Native American and that was Warren.


The effect?


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.”

Hot Air picks up on this meme - and the trouble coming from the hole that Warren placed herself in...

This embarrassment comes courtesy of the curious American identity fetish. It wouldn’t exist at all if we hadn’t set up perverse incentives to make baseless (or at least undocumented) claims about heritage in order to gain financial advantages. This fetish started as a means to assist the truly underprivileged overcome economic disadvantages imposed by government discrimination, but became yet another means to exploit employment and educational placement systems for unfair advantage.


Can anyone objectively looking at Elizabeth Warren’s life make a case that a 1/32nd Native American background, even if it’s true, disadvantaged her in any way at all? Of course not; not even Warren can make that case, which is why Warren now says she used that identity claim for social purposes rather than economic advantage. Harvard’s actions speak louder than those words, however.


In the short run, Warren should be thoroughly discredited as a political candidate. In the long run, it’s far past the time to reconsider the incentives placed on ethnic heritage claims in education and employment, and to put a stop to affirmative action. Instead, we should be focused on improving schools through competition so that we produce equitable outcomes up front rather than treat people differently later.

Mark Steyn takes a clue by four to the arrogant and entitled Elizabeth Warren in his column for this week....calling her the Composite Woman:

Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have — hang on, let me get out my calculator — duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding-license application. And now it’s here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren’s memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams from My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.


Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran’ma as Cherokee, but let’s cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind — “people who are like I am,” 31/32nds white, and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America’s melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

Need we also think about the obvious double standard at work - what would be the response to this if Elizabeth Warren was a Republican?