#MASen Update: Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee Nation

In Massachusetts, more than five weeks after the Native American controversy surrounding Elizabeth Warren first broke, these are still just some of the stories that voters in the Bay State are reading this morning –

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• Lowell Sun editorial – Maybe Now Warren Will Come Clean.  But if Warren knowingly embraced the unsupported information to get ahead, she is guilty of a shameful mistake.  In the latter case, we’d have to seriously consider whether she has the character and integrity to represent the people of Massachusetts in Washington, D.C.  Over a month ago, when The Boston Herald broke the story about Warren’s undocumented claim to a Cherokee heritage, The Sun questioned the story’s relevance. We felt there were more important things to learn about Warren, like how she would plan to get the unemployed back to work and reduce the nation’s $16 trillion debt, which is strangling economic growth.  However, the story has not gone away. That’s because Warren keeps digging a deeper hole for herself every time she persists that what she was told is true.

• Boston Globe — Boston’s ministers skeptical of Elizabeth Warren.  Rivers said the questions are legitimate and could affect Warren’s image in the black community and the public at large.  “It is within bounds to raise the question of whether or not a white woman used the minority card for her professional advantage,” said Rivers.  “Ancestry is not the issue,” Rivers added, saying that Warren’s handling of the controversy raises questions beyond her heritage. “Did you tell the truth? Because you marketed yourself as the good-guy, straight-shooting-populist, representing-poor-people candidate.”

• Boston Herald — Tom Menino slow to back Elizabeth Warren.  Elizabeth Warren has 96 percent of the Bay State’s Democratic delegates in her corner, but she still hasn’t closed the deal with one of Massachusetts’ most influential politicians — Mayor Thomas M. Menino….“Warren isn’t his cup of tea,” said longtime City Hall watcher Joe Slavet.  “He comes from a working-class culture. He wouldn’t even know how to start a conversation with Elizabeth Warren and vice-versa. … He’s torn between a guy that he knows how to get along with and a higher kind of question, which is, can he contribute to getting a bigger majority in the Senate?”

• Finally, make sure to read this morning analysis of recent #MASenate poll numbers from Washington Post’s The Fix — What’s more, Warren’s personal image has taken a hit, with her unfavorable rating rising from 23 percent to 32 percent over the last two months, even as her favorable rating ticked up just one point. She’s still in plenty positive territory (48 percent favorable, 32 percent unfavorable), but she’s underwater when it comes to independents (35 percent favorable, 38 percent unfavorable).…Whatever the case, the last couple of months seem to have helped him with this group; his lead among independents grew by 10 points — 51 percent to Warren’s 13 percent.  UNH pollster Andrew Smith told The Fix “this issue is having an impact on Democrats and independents who, in Massachusetts, typically would vote for the Democratic candidate. And it’s happening when the campaign really hasn’t even begun.”

• Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee Nation from Bloomberg –The Boston Globe reported that Warren claimed no minority status in applying to college or law school. Her application to Rutgers University Law School, which Warren attended, included the question: “Are you interested in applying for admission under the Program for Minority Group Students?” Warren answered, “No.” Yet at some point in the late 1980s, when she was teaching law at the University of Pennsylvania, Warren began listing herself as Native American in a legal directory. A recently-unearthed article from a 1997 Fordham Law Review describes Warren as the Harvard Law School faculty’s “first woman of color.” Was Warren gaming the system to make herself more appealing to employers? The rules of racial preference are murky, but anyone in Warren’s position would’ve understood that, all other things being equal, nonwhite status bestowed an advantage. Meanwhile, both Penn and Harvard seemed all too eager to claim credit for an extra dose of racial diversity on their faculties that, in reality, they lacked. Fewer than 13 percent of American Indians have a bachelor’s degree, compared with almost 31 percent of whites. Median earnings among American Indians are roughly two-thirds those of whites. Penn, Harvard and other prominent schools have reason, beside historical injustice, to give qualified American Indian (or black or Hispanic) applicants a second look or even a modest helping hand. A commitment to fostering pluralism, and a breadth of experience and cultures, is central to their mission.

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