Posted on 05/04/2012 8:42:31 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Are Democrats about to lose the Senate seat held by the Kennedys since before I was born ... again? According to the Boston Herald’s Joe Battenfeld, a number of Democrats in Massachusetts are aghast over Elizabeth Warren's faceplant on her claims to Native American heritage, and now worry about whether her campaign has completely derailed:
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.
Political analyst Larry Sabato is more blunt:
“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.”
That becomes even more apparent when one looks at the context of Warren’s placement at Harvard. Paul Bedard did some digging for the Washington Examiner and found that Warren was nearly alone on the Harvard Law faculty in terms of her alma mater’s status among law schools:
That “box checking,” as critics call it, likely played a role in her Harvard hiring especially when her background is compared to those of the other near-100 Harvard Law School professors and assistant professors, according to an analysis of law schools the professors attended. Most graduated from Harvard, and all from the nation’s top 10. Warren graduated from Rutgers University in Newark, ranked 82nd by Top-Law-Schools.com.
What’s more, only Rutgers has current law school professors who graduated from Rutgers. And in the analysis of the law school degrees of the roughly 350 Ivy League law school professors provided by a Warren critic, only one graduated from a lower-ranked law school than Warren, a Yale professor who attended the University of Nebraska Law School, ranked 89.
Harvard used that claim to brag about their own inclusiveness. Now they won’t even clarify if they’re still counting Warren as their lone Native American, Hillary Chabot reports for the Herald, which is having a field day with Warren’s identity crisis:
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.
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.
Are Dems going to have a pow-wow to discuss what to do?
Apparently, she thought establishing a minority status would help her in seeking jobs, yet on every job application I’ve completed, and I have completed a lot lately, it states clearly that the company does NOT discriminate on the basis of sex or race. What gives?
I thought there was a lowest sleeze level.
However, Massachusetts dim-bulb-crats always manage to prove me wrong.
This woman is beyond incompetent...she defines it...and yet MA voters will still go for her.
Really, we need to start a succession movement now. I want nothing to do with this state...or CA...or MI...screw ‘em!
RE: it states clearly that the company does NOT discriminate on the basis of sex or race. What gives?
____________________________________
What a company says and what the hiring manager does (and it is VERY HARD to discern his inner motives) are two different things.
For instance, it is against the law to discriminate in your hiring and firing based on a person’s AGE. Yet, it is a known fact ( and open secret ) that those above the age of 55 are the one’s who are :
1) MOST OFTEN THE FIRST TO BE LAID OFF
2) NOT UNDER CONSIDERATION FOR HIRING.
I know I am going to get the occasional post from some FReepers saying he is being hired at an above 55 age and so, but his does nothing to refute the fact that this is happening most often.
In France for instance, there have been numerous cases where a minority (often, North African) college graduate CHANGED his name on a resume and actually got the job interview compared to when he used his real African name.
Same principle applies to what a company writes in its legal forms.
There are democrats, like former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn, openly supporting Brown. [although, is Flynn a democrat in the likes of Zell Miller?]
We will see how Princess Spreading Bull fares... she might be following for the most part Marsha Cokely’s slimesteps.
In an attempt to prove she is a Cherokee—or at least 1/32 of a Cherokee—Ms. Liz is going to change her last name from Warren to War Hen.
What the hell is everybody surprised at? She's lying!! She's a Democrat. Nothing surprising there.
She who lives by identity politics, dies by identity politics.
Mark Levin observes:
More than Half of Harvard Law School faculty are Harvard Graduates themselves.
It is VERY DIFFICULT for a non-Ivy grad to be hired at the Harvard Law School and Warren, being a Rutgers University grad (nothing wrong with that) knows this.
Hence, knowing the PC nature of Harvard’s hiring policies, she did what she could to make it -— LIE.
And the so-called, smart people at Harvard bought it too -— Hook, line and sinker.
The next question is this — knowing the nature of Warren’s hiring, what is Harvard going to do about it?
Not everyone in the state is a Dim-ocrat.
Large parts are quite conservative. Brown will win re-election.
What was her excuse today? She checked the native American box so she could attend some luncheons or such? DIGBAT Alert!
Shades of a Johnny Preston song featuring Ward “Running Bear” Churchill and Elizabeth “Little White Dove” Warren.
This is what happens when there is a true, professional news organization willing to report the truth.
Several months ago I wrote on FR that before election day, Dems would be wishing that Martha Coakley was running again..
Soon even the braggarts who run their mouths on talk radio will figure out that the myth of the Left as being an unstoppable monolithic juggernaut are bunk. I can understand why some conservatives have to peddle that junk since it makes them seem as the only option, “listen or them ‘libruls’ will destroy America” that their audience has against an implacable non-destructible enemy, but is all bunk, as is the left. The Left is comprised of cults rigidly segregated. Obama has put them all on the same short yellow bus and they are not strapped in.
Honest Injun.
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