DNC Pins Hopes on Shredded Credibility of Elizabeth Warren

The Democratic National Convention tonight is pinning its hopes on the shredded credibility of Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, who has been caught telling so many blatant lies during the course of her campaign she has become a national laughing stock. 

When she gives her speech introducing former President Bill Clinton this evening, she’s expected to make a series of attacks on the Republican candidates. The problem this presents for Democrats is simple. Will anyone who’s not a hard core left-wing radical believe a word she says?

The public humiliation of Ms. Warren began when the Boston Herald reported that she had, since the 1980s and well into the 1990s “checked the affirmative action box” and claimed Native American ancestry, despite no credible evidence to support that claim.

Even the reliably liberal Boston Globe, which originally promoted the false meme that she was 1/32 Cherokee, was forced to recant, and called on Ms. Warren to fess up.

Then, of course, there was the revelation that one of her ancestors had actually been a member of the Tennessee militia that rounded up Cherokees in preparation for the Trail of Tears.

And who can forget her Pow Wow Chow cookbook plagiarism? Here’s a description of the origin of the recipes she submitted to that classic work:

Two of the possibly plagiarized recipes, said in the Pow Wow Chow cookbook to have been passed down through generations of Oklahoma Native American members of the Cherokee tribe, are described in a New York Times News Service story as originating at Le Pavilion, a fabulously expensive French restaurant in Manhattan. The dishes were said to be particular favorites of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter.

The two recipes, “Cold Omelets with Crab Meat” and “Crab with Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing,” appear in an article titled “Cold Omelets with Crab Meat,” written by Pierre Franey of the New York Times News Service that was published in the August 22, 1979 edition of the Virgin Islands Daily News, a copy of which can be seen here.

Ms. Warren’s 1984 recipe for Crab with Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing  is a word-for-word copy of Mr. Franey’s 1979 recipe.

These claims proved a bonanza for conservatives who have creatively developed a series of nicknames for Ms. Warren, ranging from Fauxcahontas to Lieawatha.

Then came her bizarre claim that her parents had “eloped,” because her father’s parents objected to their union due to his mother’s supposed Native American ancestry, which was quickly debunked.

Her pattern when provided with evidence of her lies? Not only does she “double down” on them, she “triples down.” She seems to believe the more she repeats her lies, the louder she makes them, the better she will be able to persuade voters to believe them.

When the 1993 Harvard Women’s Law Journal that confirmed she claimed minority status was uncovered, she was finally forced to admit to the Boston Globe that, yes, she did tell Harvard she deserved minority status, even though she had no evidence to support the claim. 

Then of course, there were her subsequent blunders and whoppers.

In June, Breitbart caught her telling a tall tale about a composite grandmother.

In July, she made a campaign commercial that pointed to Communist China as a great model for the United States, then called herself the savior of capitalism.

Just as the laughter surrounding her false claims of Native American ancestry began to lessen, another controversy erupted, when it was discovered that claims of scientific misconduct made against her in 1990 have never been publicly resolved :

When Harvard Law School offered Elizabeth Warren a tenured faculty position in February 1993, administrators at the school knew that her scholarship had been criticized harshly. Between 1989 and 1991, three leading academic experts on bankruptcy wrote devastating critiques of the 1989 book she co-authored with Teresa Sullivan and Jay Westbrook, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America. The reviews, published in highly respected academic journals, belied claims made at the time of her hiring by Harvard Law School Dean Robert C. Clark that her work reflected “excellent scholarship” and by Appointments Committee member Professor Charles Fried that she was “at the very top of her profession as a scholar.”

Charges from one expert, Professor Philip Shuchman of Rutgers Law School, that Warren and her co-authors engaged in “scientific misconduct” were made in a 1990 edition of the Rutgers Law Review. Those charges remain controversial to this day. 

And it’s in these claims of questionable academic research where featuring Ms. Warren at the DNC may prove the most damaging to the Democratic Party. Though her research has been cited as the basis for the Dodd-Frank bill and its secretive and autocratic Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an increasing number of academics are pointing out its flaws.

Highlighting Ms. Warren and her long list of misrepresentations does nothing to engender confidence in the Democratic Party’s plans for the economy. As Ms. Warren speaks to the DNC tonight, conservatives will readily provide fact checks on the litany of falsehoods we all expect to emanate from the embattled Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate.