Her checking the box in college sucks, but it doesn’t ruffle my feathers. I consider her releasing a DNA test and campaign video doubling down on her probable and distant Native American ancestry to be the strategic blunder.
No one that was going to vote for her cared about the college misstep. At least, not enough to vote against her. No amount of DNA would make Trump and cronies stop calling her Pocahontas. What her move did do is reignite the discussion and make her look foolish to anyone on the fence.
Letting the narrative be about Warren’s idiotic claims to being a native American is indeed an unforced error on the part of the Democrats
Elizabeth Warren is not the hero the Democrats need. Move away from her.
The Democrats need to start leveraging young retired military. They have a bunch of them, because my generation spent half their lives at war. THOSE are the candidates who will win elections in places that aren’t the West coast or the Northeast.
It’s depressing because what it reflects is reacting to the bully, allowing the bully to define the narrative. I think that’s the most annoying part of it, trying to assume some kind of good faith conversation.
It’s like the bully says “Oh ho, here’s a nerd folks!” and then the other person goes “No, look, i’m not a nerd! Here i am in the yearbook as “Least Nerdy Person” of 1980!”. And the bully laughs and says “That’s just what a nerd would say!”
We can’t have someone trying to beat Trump by spending all their time parrying the low effort trash he throws in their direction. Notice that he immediately laughed off her “proof” and refuses to pay. It has nothing to do with genuine conversation.
If, otoh, you think there is no way to do this, then we’ve already lost. If when Trump calls the Democratic candidate “low energy!” and you’re stuck scrambling around trying to prove that’s not true. No, that is not going to win an election.
We need a candidate to laugh it off and then smack him with evidence after evidence of his transgressions.
I’d be surprised if Warren ran her announcement past the DSCC. Democrats didn’t do this; Warren did.
Gaffe politics privilege Republicans. They can say whatever the fuck they want to and no one cares. Trump is gaslighting central. Democrats slip up once and the world ends: Dean’s scream, Obama’s “god and guns” and “if you like it, you can keep it” and Hillary’s “deplorables” were, yes, political errors. But the only reason they were albatrosses is because the GOP is an umbrage machine that expertly leverages the media to amplify gaffes over policy. Trump can grab em by the pussy or mock reporters or use Pocahontas as a racial slur or a million other shitty things that would instantly and permanently sink any Democratic candidate. Warren does one mildly stupid thing, and the internet erupts in hand-wringing and it may indeed sink her candidacy. Jesus. Democrats need to get better at shrugging this shit off and pointing guns outward instead of inward.
Extremely odd, since there are a half dozen governors in the midwest and south who could use more RGA spending, but there you go. Money the RGA is spending to defend a governorship in South Carolina is money they’re not spending in Florida, Georgia, Wisconsin, etc.
Actually, the way I heard it was that Harvard was trying to tout that its faculty was diverse, and did a survey of its faculty members to find out what their background was. She mentioned on the form that there was a family story about her having a Cherokee ancestor. That’s it. Harvard never used the info about her to claim she was Native American in any way, nor did Warren seek any special advantage/status from doing so. The fact she’d written something on the stupid form was oppo-researched as a talking point for Scott Brown’s campaign.
That’s how the whole damn thing got started, per the third hand account I read somewhere. Has anyone looked at Snopes yet?
It’s like when the US was figuring insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every screw up that the allied forces made was the entire focal point of everything, despite the guys they were fighting basing almost their entire strategy on intentionally murdering civilians. Hussein never had to deal with any of that, because he just murdered civilians every day.
Once you establish yourself as doing terrible things, you are free to do terrible things and no one reports it.
If you are generally good, then every step you take off the path of righteousness is reported.
But you still need to try to be the good guy. The answer to terrorism isn’t to become a terrorist.
What did they run against Connor Lamb? The best they could come up with was, “he likes Nancy Pelosi!”
Last night there was a debate for the VA-07, the race pitting incumbent David Brat (the guy who unseated Eric Cantor back in the day, thus scaring the moderate out of any republican on Capitol Hill) against Democratic challenger (and former CIA analyst) Abigail Spanberger. This is a race Cook has rated as a toss-up, based mostly on Brat being a shitty congressman, but also his district having been redrawn.
At any rate, Brat mentioned Nancy Pelosi 21 times in the course of the debate, to the point that the audience was audibly groaning and laughing (at him) when he kept doing it.
But if the terrorists murder everyone anyway, it doesn’t matter how good you are.
This is the whole Fall of Rome problem, when one side starts so flagrantly eroding the spirit of the law and traditions that hold it all together. If the people are a mob and only cheer as the flames engulf the respectability of the past, there are no easy answers.
Ulimately (and this is imo) we need to start appealing directly to the voters. Tell them - Look, here’s this guy. You know he’s bad. If you really vote for him, and you know this, you’re starting to be bad too.
Because for too long conservative voters have lived in this strange parallel world of liberal conspiracies and incompetence while “conservatives” are the magnates of politics and industry - yet everything keeps getting worse. We need to “wake up” conservatives and point to them, not Trump, and say that they are responsible for their votes and the outcomes that happen. Honestly, i think that will resonate far better than the distraction politics of today, because they’re the ones passing around all the Wake Up memes on Facebook. Confront voters!
Considering the people that would use this minor issue as a reason to vote for her opponent would likely never have voted for her in any event - why? No one is perfect, and the right wing rage machine, with the willing cooperation of our news media (who still haven’t faced up to their role in 2016) excels at turning the slightest speck into an illusory meteor.
Veterans don’t seem to fare so well in national politics. From 1980-2008 there was at least one vet in every Presidential contest (excluding 1984, when never-deployed Reagan faced never-deployed Mondale), and the vet lost every time. (In 1988, both Bush and Dukakis were vets.)
