On Monday morning, Elizabeth Warren released a 5+ minute video aimed at making two simple points: 1) She is, as she claimed for years, at least marginally Native American and 2) She never got ahead because of it.
“The facts suggest that you absolutely have a Native American ancestor in your pedigree,” Carlos Bustamante, a professor of genetics at Stanford University, tells Warren in a video released by her campaign.
So why did Warren do this — and do it now — and what lessons should we learn from it? Here we go!
1. She’s running in 2020. You don’t do a “clearing of the decks” like this unless you are trying to get your origin story 100% straight going into a run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
2. She’s running in 2020. (See No. 1)
3. She wants to show Democrats she won’t be “Swift-Boated.” In 2004, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry watched his military service used against him by forces aligned with George W. Bush’s campaign. In hindsight, Democrats believe Kerry was taken by surprise by the attacks and shouldn’t have been. What Warren is making clear here is that she won’t make the same mistake, that she will be (and already is) ready.
4. Trump’s attacks were hurting her. Since it became clear Warren might be a 2020 candidate, Trump has regurgitated his 2016 attack on her as “Pocahontas.” If this attack wasn’t hurting Warren — whether it was with activists, donors or just her own personal pride — she would never have engaged at the level she did. A slick, campaign-style video, a DNA test AND a mountain of documentation about her background? That feels like overkill if this is a tiny problem. Given the reaction of Warrenworld, you can be sure they didn’t believe it was a tiny problem.
5. This doesn’t solve everything. OK, so the DNA test suggested there’s a very strong likelihood that Warren is somewhere between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American. That’s not exactly a conclusive pushback against attacks from Trump and other Republicans — particularly if Warren is the nominee. (“She owes the country an apology,” Trump said Monday afternoon.) Also: Don’t assume this stuff will only be used by Trump; if Warren runs, you can bet her Democratic opponents will float it as evidence that she might not be able to beat Trump in the general election.
Warren’s attempt to get beyond this debate was made even more complicated late Monday, when Chuck Hoskin Jr., the secretary of state of the Cherokee Nation, said, “a DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America.”
The Point: This is a bold move for any presidential candidate to make at any time — much less before you’ve even announced for president and before the 2020 campaign has even officially started. It speaks to both Warren’s ambitions in 2020 and her worries about having her murky background story exploited for political gain.
