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Special Report
Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren may win against Massachusetts’ Scott Brown tomorrow, but she isn’t smiling.
The day before the Massachusetts Senate election, the polls still have it a dead heat. Neither Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren or incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown can justifiably claim at this point to holding a numerical advantage of any substance. The race will be decided tomorrow by the good people of Massachusetts, and by how many of them are passionate enough to brave the early November cold to find their way down to the polling places. As a political journalist in an age when politics so rarely rises to a level that even deserves journalism — even the degraded, nonsensical version of journalism practiced today — it’s a little sad to see this brilliant, fascinating race finally come to an end.
My favorite Democrat, writer Mike Barnicle, told me in an interview back in April — just two days before Elizabeth Warren’s marquee scandal broke — that Warren-Brown was already shaping up to be the most “literary” political race that we’ve seen in our lifetimes. It was exactly the kind of observation a Massachusetts native would make, and exactly the kind that Elizabeth Warren, for all her academic pedigree, would never be able to fully understand.
There was a moment in the second debate, held in October at the Tsongas Center in Lowell, Massachusetts, that defined better than anything what’s truly at stake in the election. Asked to say one nice thing about his opponent, Brown replied, “She’s a very hardworking, accomplished professor, and she’s certainly very qualified.” He paused for a moment. “As a matter of fact, she’s such a good professor, and I’ve heard from parents who have actually had their kids being taught by her, that she’s wonderful. So I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that she can continue to be in that position.” The crowd laughed. Elizabeth Warren didn’t.
Massachusetts is defined by its love of politics. That love stems from many different historical factors — including a boisterous local press and a tradition of Boston political machines so charming that their rampant corruption was merely considered colorful behavior. Scott Brown grew up in Massachusetts and so he appreciates that love. It’s why, when he’s holding a press conference accusing Warren of disenfranchising asbestos victims with her legal work, he knows to hold the incriminating documents up to the cameras, palms out, one on either side of him. (Can the reporters read, from that distance, what the documents say? No, but that’s just what you do when holding such press conferences.) It’s why, when the Warren camp trots out some lawyer to stage his own outdoor press conference accusing Brown of holding up misleading documents, Brown’s campaign manager goes down to the event, points at the lawyer and smirks to the reporters, “I think he’s donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrats, but…”
One side genuinely loves this stuff. The other side doesn’t.
Warren’s own past sins, of course, were a large part of what made this race so literary. They were deep, dark, devious sins, ones that perfectly fed into the state’s Catholic thirst for tragedy and scandal. But they proved how out of touch she is with the Massachusetts sensibility. They proved that she cares only about the ends and not the means, the accomplishments and not the process. In a state that values hard work for its own sake and elections for their own sake, that’s a terrible quality for a politician to have.
Some Americans will always remember where they were when they watched the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the Red Sox winning the World Series. I have my own conservative blogger version of that.
On April 27, 2012, the Boston Herald reported that clearly-white Elizabeth Warren had identified herself as a Native American when applying to teach at Harvard Law School, and that Harvard later cited her presence on staff as evidence of its faculty’s diversity. When it first went to print, the Warren campaign was shellshocked. The Herald wrote that “campaign aides last night scrambled but failed to produce documents proving her family’s lineage.” A video showed Warren and her staffers frantically running out the back door of a campaign event to avoid the press. A week later, Warren finally told reporters that she knew of her supposed 1/32nd Cherokee roots because her “papaw” had “high cheekbones, like all of the Indians do.”
It was utterly amazing. Dominick Dunne couldn’t have written a sexier story. This woman was caught in one of the most bizarre acts of fraud ever committed by an American politician. The questions poured out onto the Internet almost faster than conservative outlets could type them. When did she first list herself as nonwhite? Was she an Affirmative Action hire? Was Harvard complicit?
The Boston press, which still hasn’t changed its tone very much since the 1770s, whipped the Bay State into an Indian-themed frenzy. Cameramen were dispatched to chase Warren around at her public appearances. A local Fox news anchor played Paul Revere and the Raiders’ song “Indian Reservation” on the air. Herald columnist Howie Carr and midday conservative radio host Michael Graham fanned the flames. And the national conservative media fanned them harder. Michelle Malkin branded the Harvard professor “Fauxchontas.” Dennis Miller offered to send her a campaign contribution in beads.
But when a story is simply too good to be controlled, all kinds of concerns arise — as they did in this case for Republicans. Would the media attention undercut just how serious Warren’s sin really was? What about the poor real-life Native Americans Warren disenfranchised? Would they be exploited by the 24-hour cable coverage, creating backlash against Brown?
Covering the race for the Washington Free Beacon, I called up the prominent Cherokee writer Twila Barnes to get a genuine Native American perspective. She denounced Warren and explained how her fellow Cherokees found Warren’s cheekbone comments “stereotypical and insulting.” Two days after I published my interview, Barnes appeared on Fox News to repeat those same charges. Liberals started fighting back in the blogosphere, calling Barnes a Republican shill trotted out by conservatives to lend credence to the controversy. Barnes’ sincere motives aside, the public wasn’t entirely buying her angle.
But another Boston source phoned me and explained just how damaging the story truly was for Warren in Massachusetts, in ways unrelated to the racial aspect. Anyone who grew up in Boston knows that this is bigger than a mere gaffe, he said, and he was right. This was something deeper, something more tragic, and it had everything to do with Harvard. The Harvard campus, that Puritan sanctuary overlooking working-class Boston across the Charles River, was besmirched. Warren and Harvard, and the dim feelings people in Massachusetts have about each, would henceforth be inextricably linked. And the April 27 front page of the Boston Herald, its beautiful tabloid imagery reminiscent of the British press, would always remain in people’s minds: a photograph of Warren’s desperate face pasted over the Harvard campus skyline with the headline, “HARVARD (F)LAW.”
THE SCANDAL UNDERSCORED just how prominent, inevitable even, Warren’s electoral chances had become, before people in Massachusetts really knew anything about her. What kind of person was she? Perhaps they knew that she grew up in Oklahoma and that she’s married to fellow Harvard professor Bruce Mann. But what about her first husband and the father of her two children? The man described on her Wikipedia page as her “high-school boyfriend”?
The Northwest Classen High School (Oklahoma City, OK) yearbook of 1964 features “Jim Warren” as a short young man with thick glasses and straight A’s in math. His future wife Elizabeth Herring, class of ‘66, was two years behind him. They married in 1967 and had two children, Amelia (1971) and Alexander (1976). Jim was a computer engineer who started his career in New Jersey and then moved to Houston, where his wife, by then “Elizabeth Warren,” divorced him in 1978.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (38) | Leave a comment
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MelvinNC| 11.5.12 @ 6:34AM
I'm sick and damn tired of lawyers and I'm sick and damn tired of Harvard law professors. How in the world can the people of Massachusetts vote this lying scheming, snake in the grass crone to the United States Senate?
It's frigging inconceivable. Warren doesn't have a single gram of integrity in her entire miserable carcass.
Is this the kind of crap that Harvard puts out these days. Elizabeth Warren shouldn't even be a professor let alone a United States Senator.
I used to think highly of Harvard University, but then again I used to think highly of allot of things today that used to stand for everything good, and just in this Country. And now the people of Mass. very well might elect a lying, fake ass Native American to the US Senate. I suppose Elizabeth Warren will be in good company with the rest of the lying, and scheming lawyers that currently hold the title of Senator.
drudge ette obama| 11.5.12 @ 7:04AM
Pow Wow Chow Lizzie Warren lied about recipes being her family's and lied about them being Indian-based. (Whoe ver heard of an ancient Indian recipe using cognac?) In fact, she pilfered them word for word from a New York chef who had published them in a copyrighted article.
She is like Hillary Clinton, attaching herself to the coat-tails of some bigger man. Harvard U. and Lizzie Warren are tied together in spirit and progressivism. Just listen to Lizzie cry that no one built their business on their own, that the police and road builders made capitalism possible. Obama took a page out of her progressive playbook on that one.
This article is interesting in that Lizzie is a product of her past. We see from the article that she may not have been such a good girl in her first marriage. This shows in the sterotypical racial comments she makes about the old cheekbones and the Pow Wow Chow recipes. If Massachusetts votes her in, they deserve her. But the rest of us don't.....
Joellen| 11.5.12 @ 4:54PM
Well I have to add to your list of those who cant be trusted, democrat "writer" Mike Barnicle himself who plagarized from GEORGE CARLIN. Gosh you just cant make this stuff up
SUBVET| 11.5.12 @ 10:07AM
That's why I devorced my 1st wife she came from mass-a-too-shits.....she had no clue.
I can only say I was thinking with the wrong head.....
Occam's Tool| 11.5.12 @ 7:18PM
I'm so sorry that your 1st wife was a Masshole. You deserve better than that, sir.
My two adopted children are both from Guatemala (adopted before the subhuman vermin at UNICEF arranged to shut international adoption down in that country)---Rebekah is a full blooded Mayan, Ike is Mestizo. You can imagine how I feel about Princess Albino Wolf.
Between Obama insulting physicians, then escaping being killed by his incompetence by an Act of Fate, then having to deal with this worthless bitch who insults my kids, I'm f'in fed up with Libtard Democrats.
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 11.5.12 @ 6:50AM
To compound matters, Elizabeth Warren stole some Indian recipes and wrote a fake Indian cookbook, Pow Wow Chow. She has also been practicing law without a license. That alone would have ended a Republican campaign.
What we have is a fake Indian who may also be a fake attorney who wrote a fake cookbook. Tomorrow, she may become a real Senator, sent to the Senate by genuine morons from Massachusetts.
Tom Kyba| 11.5.12 @ 10:26AM
Well encapsulated and thoroughly disgusting.
Alan| 11.5.12 @ 7:37AM
The whole area known as New England has been a leftist bastion for decades. WTF these people have in their water, or smoke, or use for brainfood up there is mystery X.
Von Mises Jr| 11.5.12 @ 8:39AM
Living in the Northeast, I have been to the White Mountains of New Hampshire many times. I wore a TEA Party T-shirt to dine one night in NH and got acquainted with the owner of the establishment. He was a Ron Paul enthusiast and I thank him for turning me onto www.mises.org.
The people in the White Mountains are from a conservative origin. The problem they have is people from Boston buying ski homes in the Notches and exporting their liberalism. My restaurant owner friend described them as Massholes.
This is a toss-up in MA. I avoid MA and VT on my trips. I stopped in VT once with my son and we accidentally wandered onto a nude gay beach at Lake Willoughby. My teenage son freaked and he agrees with me that we will not return to VT. I had written off visiting MA long ago.
Occam's Tool| 11.5.12 @ 7:19PM
Cape Cod Blows, and the food is shit.
Stormzeye| 11.5.12 @ 7:46AM
Excellent expose of this lying carpetbagger's history and yet another example of the dangers of affirmative action. Harvard's warm embrace of Obama and Warren would never have happened prior to the 70's when that institution still had some standards. Scott Brown is the real deal.......like Romney, a Republican who can do business with the moonbats of Massachusetts and resist progressivism when it counts.
JP| 11.5.12 @ 8:05AM
"This woman was caught in one of the most bizarre acts of fraud ever committed by an American politician. The questions poured out onto the Internet almost faster than conservative outlets could type them. When did she first list herself as nonwhite? Was she an Affirmative Action hire? Was Harvard complicit?"
In a saner world Warren woudl have been humiliated to such a degree that she would quietly drop and return to her world of Muliti-Culti Law and lucarative legal billings. But much has change in one decade. The people of MA would rather be represented by this unhinged quota queen than by a Republican who voted with the Dems 50% of the time. The scars of the 2000 elections must run very deep.
Another casualty of this election cycle is Harvard Law. How many more incompetent wierdos must parade in front of the You Tube cameras before Harvard's brand is permanently damaged?
Morley| 11.5.12 @ 8:50AM
It became clear to me long ago and I have been saying for years - you can't embarrass a Democrat.
RJ| 11.5.12 @ 12:05PM
So true. Mrs. Warren also seems to be the female version of Obama. She created a phony past and obtains elevated positions in society without any significant accomplishments. It is out of touch and doesn't realize it.
Hardcard| 11.5.12 @ 8:55AM
These mass-holes are the same fools that kept fat dead drunken ted, bwany fwank, jean-paul kerry and iron mike dukakis in orrifice.
JimP| 11.5.12 @ 9:05AM
MA's Catholics thirst for trajedy and scandal?! As opposed to Catholics elsewhere and Protestants everwhere? Is that why they kept voting for the Kennedies? It is delightful to read about Warren's troubles stemming from her Fauxchahontas persona. Reading about people's love of politics in MA is troubling though, IMHO. I was taught from a very early age that politics is a necessary evil and to never, ever, ever trust a politician. Ever. Some turn out to be OK, and on occasion honorable- like Reagan, but one must always assume the pol has already commited enough crimes to deserve being horse whipped, tarred and feathered, and then run out of town on a rail just for starters, and that he/she intends or is already planning on commiting more crimes. Politicians are liars and cheats by profession. They rank right along side the oldest profession in esteem and trustworthyness. Understand too that there is a difference between a politician and a statesman, which I will not define at the moment. To love politics is akin to loving sin/Satan/evil/wrongdoing. That's what I was taught. Perhaps this view of politics is confined to we Southerners primarily. That would explain a lot of things. It's interesting and informative to get an 'insiders' view of The Bay State character.
Pecos Pete| 11.5.12 @ 9:20AM
I have a nightmare to share: Warren wins in 2012. Obama wins in 2012. In 2016, Warren runs for president (Biden repeats as vp) ... and wins. In 2016, Obama is appointed/elected to Secretary-General of the UN. In 2016, Michelle is elected to the Senate from Hawaii and is simultaneously hired as the CEO of NPR.
Now that's some bad juju.
JimP| 11.5.12 @ 9:24AM
Sounds like you ate a very large peperoni pizza with hot peppers just before bed last night Pete.
RCV| 11.5.12 @ 9:36AM
You are in for one big dose of reality tomorrow night. The efforts by Republican governors in Ohio, Florida and Virginia to prevent Americans from being able to cast their ballots are only increasing determination to get to the polls and reelect the President. And they will.
Alej| 11.5.12 @ 11:42AM
Another god damned lawyer troll.
RCV| 11.5.12 @ 11:48AM
Another tin-foil hat Johnny Reb.
JimP| 11.5.12 @ 12:29PM
Ah. An anti-Southern bigot. Why am I not surprised.
RCV| 11.6.12 @ 4:25PM
No sir. Most Southerners are fine people, and good loyal Americans. Alej is a guy who hates Blacks, misses slavery and wants to secede from the United States of America. There's a big difference.
Archie| 11.5.12 @ 1:36PM
Such as? I live in VA and pay reasonably close attention to politics. I have no idea what you're talking about.
Occam's Tool| 11.5.12 @ 7:22PM
Archie, RCV is a Californian. He is a nice man, who does not realize how badly beaten he will be tomorrow.
However, Elric of Melnibone will explain it for him on Wednesday. The Dems are to go up against the souldrinking sword, and their spirit will fail them. Watch.
gene| 11.5.12 @ 10:13AM
If she were a Republican, she would have been indicted by now and disbarred. Also charged with plagiarism. Also fraud where she would have been sued for fraudulently taking millions over the years from Harvard in salary and benefits that she took from Real Native Americans. Ward Ward Churchill never paid back the millions he took by fraud and neither will this woman. However, if the "Polls" call it even, that translates that she will son be out of this job and returning to a University.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 11.5.12 @ 10:57AM
Perhaps if Ms. Warren were to take an asbestos litigant and an American Indian, seal them in the passenger compartment of her vehicle, drive it off a bridge and swim away without reporting it, leaving them to slowly asphyxiate, she could be guaranteed winning this Senate seat until she died decades later.
PolishKnight| 11.5.12 @ 12:51PM
Among the hypocrisies of the left, there's the fossil fuel conundrum: New Jerseyers are waiting in line for days for GASOLINE. Here's an opportunity for Obama to buy some Chinese made solar cells to hand out to the people to rebuild. Who needs all those pesky fossil fuels anymore?
Obama is now looking to shut down coal going into his second, more "flexible", term. Imagine the effect this is going to have on Boston and New York and even Jersey. Granted, the winters will be more mild due to "climate change" (assuming that it's not MORE cold due to global warming ending 15 years or so ago after the hockey stick ends.) But still... how will those snobs survive with $10/gallon gasoline? Those states are going to FREEZE this winter.
cicero| 11.5.12 @ 1:07PM
What a history. Talk about social climbing. Here we have a family of law professors, who are grossly overpaid by anyone's standards, with her making $350,000.00 per year teaching 2 classes a week, giving her time to practice law on the side, and run for the Senate of the U.S. No wonder the costs for a legal education are so outrageous. In addition, there is no indication that she ever practiced law, other than to write a cooperative brief so that Harvard stationary wouldd appear in the file.. And she is supposed to teach our next generation of lawyer/judges about the practice of law. (By the way, as a practicing attorney for the past 43 + years, I was taught, andd am under the impression, that the practice of law is tantamount to public service - a necessary element to a polity governed by laws, not men.)
But I ramble. I guess I have just become disgusted with psuedo-lawyers using the degree to put themselves in positions to plunder the citizens. She is no more a lawyer than the Obamas. She is a politician with a law degree. There is a huge difference.
Occam's Tool| 11.5.12 @ 7:23PM
Cicero, pick up the Death of Common Sense by Kaufman.
Once upon a time, there were attorneys that were like what you claim. However, now the vast majority of them I run into are little more than Vermin T. Maggot, attorney at law.
drudge ette obama| 11.6.12 @ 6:50AM
Cicero, 43 years as a practicing lawyer (I have about 21) should have shown you the dark side of humankind with the occasional sprinkling of fine humanity. I spent three hours in court this week with the dark side of humankind, people who wanted everything for free at the expense of you and me. Real lawyers, in the trenches, understand what you mean when you say Obama and Warren aren't real lawyers - they don't want to work hard and they like free perks.
Anyone who votes for Elizabeth Warren doesn''t deserve freedom, but they are entitled to it by living in our wonderful country.
Nina in MA| 11.5.12 @ 1:15PM
Lord help us....I for one will not vote for Warren...taking in her lies of Indian descent...what about the whispers of her law practice without a license...? This has been talked about too infrequently if you ask me...so is it true? Doesn't matter....Go Brown!
Aaron Investigates | 11.5.12 @ 1:51PM
And yet from what I can tell, the race remains close. I agree with the article, and yet still don't have the answer to that particular question.
Occam's Tool| 11.5.12 @ 7:24PM
Aaron: does the term "Masshole" mean anything to you? I spent two weeks in two separate summers in Cape Cod, and well I learned this.
Gr0w1er601| 11.5.12 @ 3:35PM
That's rich: Warren claiming to be 1/32nd Cherokee because her 'pawpaw' had high cheekbones. The things these people will say to get elected.
Gr0w1er601| 11.5.12 @ 3:35PM
That's rich: Warren claiming to be 1/32nd Cherokee because her 'pawpaw' had high cheekbones. The things these people will say to get elected.
Archie| 11.5.12 @ 5:02PM
"The Senate is sometimes called the "world's greatest deliberative body." (wiki)
At what point will we stop electing elementary school librarians to this august body? And why do they all look the same?!
Leveut| 11.5.12 @ 5:24PM
1. The Cherokee Maiden's law license "issues" have been thoroughly reviewed at LegalInsurrection.com.
2. I could be wrong, but I believe it is Foxboro, not fancy pants Foxborough.