I hate to bring up something that’s already been talked about ad nauseum, but it must be said: I am sick of this type of party. A party, mostly white and mostly male, that aims to use Native American identity for their own ends. You would have thought by now that parties like this would have figured out better ways to deal with minority women.
No, I’m not talking about the infamous PiKapp “Pilgrims and Indians” rager of Fall 2011. Elizabeth Warren, the recently anointed Democratic nominee who will challenge Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts in the fall, has dominated the news lately for self-identifying as Native American when applying for law professor jobs at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania decades ago. I’ve read every single article written about Warren and Brown for the past four weeks (long story). A recurring theme is the issue of honesty and, by extension, credibility: Can we trust Warren as a candidate for public office if she claimed something that may or may not be true?
Despite the fact that those who reviewed Warren’s applications at these institutions have publicly ensured that they hired her for her credentials, certain papers (coughBostonHeraldcough) continue to release at least an article a day questioning whether or not she got to where she is today based on falsely applied affirmative action.
These articles are entertaining because they often begin with something along the lines of “Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee controversy just won’t go away…” while managing to perpetuate the saturation. My head screams “NONE OF US GIVE A F***,” and my heart cringes as I watch a race I’m emotionally invested in go off the rails.
Voters in Massachusetts seem to agree—a recent Boston Globe poll put Scott Brown only two-points ahead of Warren, within the margin of error. With five months until Election Day, this whole thing should blow over. Regardless, the country’s premium Senate race will be nail-bitingly close. It would be nice if we could start talking about how Senator Brown voted to let interest rates on student loans double (Massachusetts has like, a few universities) or how he voted for the Blunt Amendment, which would allow employers to deny covering their employees’ health insurance for any moral and/or religious reason.
Neither of these votes should fly in a place as blue as Massachusetts. This is a state that got same-sex marriage in 2004.
In contrast, Elizabeth Warren has given hundreds of speeches and written multiple books and co-authored numerous studies explaining how deregulation of consumer credit markets in the 1980s harmed America’s middle class. In layperson-friendly language, she explains the tricks and traps credit-issuers use to mislead consumers about the real nature of the financial products they buy. She led the congressional panel charged to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the charge to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In her stump speech, she chronologically details how post-World War Two America invested in the middle class by focusing on education, infrastructure and research. She hammers home the value in rules, and how the threads of those rules were yanked-out of the regulatory blanket. She talks about the pernicious threat of bankruptcy and how the rate of families filing for bankruptcy has skyrocketed. She imagines a world in which consumers can easily compare financial products and understand the fine print without being misled.
She knows her stuff, but this narrative is getting lost in the cacophony. Since she’s never been in office, the Brown campaign doesn’t have past votes to criticize. Knowing that attacking her stances on policy wouldn’t be popular, Senator Brown has chosen to question who she is, rather than what she’s done or would do.
Realizing that she must regain control of her personal narrative, the Warren campaign is taking on the detractors: Governor Deval Patrick endorsed her just before the Massachusetts Democratic Convention, at which she earned more than 95% of delegate votes, bypassing a forced primary and catching some momentum.
Maybe Warren made a mistake identifying with those with whom she has tenuous biological connections. If the products of her academic and professional career weren’t so impressive, then this would be a much bigger issue.
But there are too many politicians guilty of similar public representations of their records for this bit of her past to define who she is as a person, especially in relation to her opponent.
An indicative example is this: Senator Brown is framing himself as a maverick that votes independently of his party, on occasion. However, even after he voted for the Dodd-Frank Act, he advocated for shielding financial institutions from the law’s provisions, such as preventing commercial banks from engaging in high-risk investments. If we’re talking about not-being-who-you-say-you-are, then Scott Brown arguably is also at fault.
It’s incredibly easy in politics to define someone before they get to define themselves, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for constituents, especially if this strategy comes at the expense of defining real differences in policy.
Senator Brown and Warren have agreed to engage in debates in the months ahead. In those debates, she should emphasize her true record as an advocate, and negate his, proving to the people of Massachusetts that she would be an infinitely better representative, regardless of how she’s being represented.
Samantha Lachman is a Trinity senior.
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