Caught in another lie, this time about how her public school teaching career came to an end, Sen. Elizabeth Warren risks giving voters the same reason to reject her as they did Hillary Clinton four years earlier: a decades-long pattern of dishonesty and shape-shifting false claims.
Warren seems to hold the hot hand right now in the Democratic presidential race. Some recent polling shows her surging to the lead in both Iowa and New Hampshire, edging ahead of former Vice President Joe Biden. She attracts Trump-sized crowds to her rallies, sticks around for hours afterward to take pictures with adoring fans, and seemingly has a detailed plan for every problem, from skyrocketing college debt to the opioid crisis.
It’s hard to deny Warren’s rising popularity, but in presidential politics, authenticity is the coin of the realm.
For Warren, a move into the front-runner position has brought increased scrutiny. Her campaign’s claim that she was “shown the door” as a special education teacher in New Jersey when she had grown visibly pregnant with her first child was contradicted by a 2007 video in which she told a different story. Back then, she spoke about how she was teaching on an “emergency certificate” and decided to go back to school to get her credentials. But, she said, “I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years.”
Records uncovered from the minutes of the local school board in 1971 seem to confirm this less dramatic version of events. They show that Warren’s contract had in fact been renewed but that Warren later submitted her resignation, which the board “accepted with regret.”
Add this little episode to the tale of Warren’s stolen Native American heritage, as well as a body of legal work that is completely at odds with the corporate-busting image she likes to present, and suddenly Warren looks a lot more vulnerable.
Before she was a senator, Warren spent time as a private attorney, but not on the side of the little guy.
LTV Steel hired Warren in the 1990s to assist the then-bankrupt company in arguing that it did not have to pay into its retirees’ healthcare fund. She also was paid by Travelers Insurance to help the company gain immunity from asbestos lawsuits. This is hardly the populist, anti-corporate message that she feeds to her supporters.
Furthermore, while Warren has acknowledged she checked the box as Native American as she was making her way up the ranks of academia, it is less well known that she gave laughably weak excuses for having done so.
When first confronted in 2012, Warren defended her claim to be a Native American by remarking that her grandfather had high cheekbones, “like all of the Indians do,” but sought no advantage from it. Pressed on why she listed herself in a directory of minority law professors, widely used as a recruiting tool by faculty hiring committees, she said she merely hoped to be invited to a “luncheon” with “people who are like I am.”
Ultimately, there were no such lunches, and after she obtained tenure at Harvard, Warren stopped listing herself as Native American. Perhaps this troubling pattern is why voters in Warren’s home state of Massachusetts have been registering their disapproval with a less-than-enthusiastic turnout for her.
Warren defeated Republican Scott Brown for Senate due to a heavy Democratic turnout in 2012, a presidential election year. Yet, she underperformed President Barack Obama by 15 points in a deep-blue state, and unenrolled voters went for Brown 59% to 41%. While she was re-elected in 2018 running against a relatively obscure Republican, Warren trailed the four other Democrats who won statewide office that year and received fewer votes than Republican Gov. Charlie Baker.
Because of a fear of being seen as carrying President Trump’s water, Warren’s large field of Democratic rivals has so far stayed clear of these controversies. But, similar to Hillary Clinton before her, Warren’s record of deceit and duplicity has the potential to come back to haunt her.
Ben Rajadurai (@brajadurai) is the executive director of the College Republican National Committee.
