USA Today Columnist: Warren Should Apologize to Native Americans

This afternoon DeWayne Wickham, a well-known liberal columnist at USA Today, called on Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren to apologize to Native Americans:

The lingering specter of a white, liberal Democrat who claimed to be a minority in a job where that status could have enhanced her chances for promotion and tenure might decide the outcome of the battle for control of Congress.

That’s why Warren must act quickly to put this issue behind her. She needs to apologize to Native Americans, whose struggles for opportunities she minimized by claiming from her position of prestige to be one of them. She should apologize to the supporters of affirmative action for undermining their efforts to bring real diversity to the faculty of Harvard’s law school. And in a “come to Jesus” speech to the people of Massachusetts, Warren needs to offer them the kind of contrition that has eluded her when discussing this issue.

Only then, I think, will she be able to turn the focus from her misspeak to Brown’s misdeeds in supporting so much of the GOP’s right-wing agenda.

Mr. Wickham’s column appears in USA Today every Tuesday and is syndicated to 130 daily newspapers. He is well known as a defender of President Obama’s policies and  is a vocal critic of the Tea Party, which he described as the modern “Know Nothing movement” in this 2010 column:

The Tea Party movement claims to be rooted in the traditional — but long compromised — Republican ideals of fiscal responsibility, small government and free markets. But its support of Arizona’s immigration law signals an intolerance of Hispanics that mirrors the Know Nothing movement’s attempt to keep Catholics out of this country.

Left alone, there’s a good chance the Tea Party will sputter out of existence as quickly as the Know Nothing movement did. But that may not be fast enough, given the stand Tea Party candidates are taking on issues. Voters should speed up that process on Election Day.

If Ms. Warren has lost DeWayne Wickham, can the New York Times and MSNBC be far behind?

Michael Patrick Leahy is a Breitbart News contributor, Editor of Broadside Books’ Voices of the Tea Party e-book series, and author of Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement.