Elizabeth Warren's Credibility Problem

For the first time in this election cycle, Elizabeth Warren has overtaken Joe Biden in the Real Clear Politics national polling average. Warren's rise shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone. After months of fawning coverage from the 'anyone but Bernie' mainstream media and the impending sense of Biden's inevitable collapse, Warren has now claimed the official front runner status. However, with that new title comes additional scrutiny. This past week the Washington Free Beacon published an investigation which is now raising doubt about the truthfulness of one of Warren's favorite personal stories from the stump.

Warren had repeatedly claimed that when she was a grade-school teacher in the early 1970s, the principal fired her for being "visibly pregnant." The Free Beacon went back and reviewed the county records, and they appear to contradict Warren's claim. Minutes from an April 1971 Riverdale Board of Education meeting show that the board voted unanimously to extend Warren a 2nd-year contract. Two months later, the minutes from another board meeting indicated that Warren's resignation was "accepted with regret."

Warren is also on tape telling a different version of the events. In 2007 in an interview with the Institute of International Studies, Warren recalled: "I worked in a public school system with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I didn't have the education courses, so I was on an "emergency certificate," it was called. I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, "I don't think this is going to work out for me." I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years, and I was really casting about, thinking, "What am I going to do?" My husband's view of it was, "Stay home. We have children, we'll have more children, you'll love this." And I was very restless about it."

It is plausible that Warren's latest account of her time as a public school teacher is the accurate version of this story. However, the seeds of doubt are there. 

The questioning of Warren's story as a public-school teacher undisputedly ties into her past claims (now undeniably false claims) of Native American ancestry. Warren's well-publicized DNA test showed her to possibly be 0.097% Native American and that she may have had a Native American ancestor 6 to 10 generations ago. Warren embarrassingly thought this DNA test proved her ancestry, but it didn't. What it did show was that Warren made a series of impossible claims about her backstory that she had to have known were impossible. The first during an interview in her 2012 senate campaign, where she claimed to have had "photographic evidence" proving her Native American ancestry. Elizabeth Warren is not Native American and, therefore, cannot have photographic evidence. The one ancestor she may have had lived nearly 200 years before the first photograph was ever taken. The second impossible claim that Warren made about her Native American ancestry was that her parents had eloped because her mom was Native American. Again, this is impossible since her mom was not Native American. Lastly, Elizabeth Warren, along with her husband, contributed to a published Cherokee cookbook where they both claimed to be Cherokee. This is the only instance in which Warren's husband claimed to be Native American. A claim they both undoubtedly knew was false. Warren pushed this false narrative to such a point that Harvard publicly referred to her as the "first woman of color" tenured (again, she is 99.90% Caucasian). 

Warren's supporters want to dismiss these inconsistencies as baseless smears and maybe they are. After all, maybe Warren's ancestry claims can be forgiven and dismissed as a naive belief in false family "lore." It is entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that Warren's latest version of her termination as a public school teacher is the accurate version. But these questions are not going away and need to be addressed head-on. Whether Warren and her supporters like it, these inconsistencies are creating a credibility problem for Warren. Donald Trump runs his campaigns on liberal hypocrisy and Warren's credibility problem needs to be litigated now in the Democratic primary. There is no hiding from it. We need to be sure we are not nominating another candidate with dangerous liabilities.