Elizabeth Warren’s political operation has been quietly hunting for a campaign headquarters, should she decide to challenge Donald Trump.
Politico reports that Warren’s aides have been prospecting sites in Boston on behalf of the Massachusetts senator’s nascent presidential campaign.
Warren has not said she is running in 2020 — she last declared that she was taking a hard look at it — having just won reelection to the U.S. Senate a month ago.
She has begun taking steps necessary to launch a bid, however, laying out her foreign policy views in a benchmark speech and addressing her controversial claim that she is of Native American heritage.
A DNA test revealed that Native American blood does run through her veins, but her ancestry is not nearly as prominent as she and a previous employer once portrayed it.
Elizabeth Warren’s political operation has been quietly hunting for a campaign headquarters, should she decide to challenge Donald Trump
Advisers to Warren have been counseling her to issue a forceful apology for releasing the results of the DNA test that revealed a sliver of American Indian blood in her family tree, a report said just as Warren’s hometown paper released an editorial urging her not to run for higher office.
‘Warren missed her moment in 2016, and there’s reason to be skeptical of her prospective candidacy in 2020,’ the Boston Globe op-ed said.
The Globe pointed out that Charlie Baker, the state’s incumbent Republican governor, performed better than she did in November’s election.
Massachusetts is a fairly reliable blue state, although it has produced several Republican governors, including Baker and incoming Utah Sen. Mitt Romney.
Even Democrats blasted Warren, a progressive senator who launched the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for Barack Obama’s administration and taught at Harvard, in October for drawing attention to her biggest political liability in the middle of a tense midterm election cycle.
Warren’s DNA analysis, conducted by a privately hired scientist who is an expert on Native American genomics, showed that her Native American ancestry was between 0.09 percent and 1.5 percent.
The low end of that scale equates to 1/1,024th.
A landmark study published in 2014 in the American Journal of Human Genetics found that, on average, European-Americans have 0.18 per cent Native American blood – twice as much.
She has begun taking steps necessary to launch a bid, however, laying out her foreign policy views in a benchmark speech and addressing her controversial claim that she is of Native American heritage
President Donald Trump has long mocked Warren’s claim of being part Cherokee, calling her ‘Pocahontas’ and licking his chops at the prospect of facing her in 2020
Pocahontas was an Algonqiuan Indian princess who lived from 1595 to 1617
The New York Times reported Thursday that Warren is concerned she damaged her standing with Native American groups and other liberal blocs, especially minority constituencies, by willingly releasing her DNA results.
An announcement about her presidential ambitions could come in a matter of weeks. So far, Warren doesn’t appear worried.
‘There have been a lot of thoughtful conversations about this, and I appreciate that,’ she told the Times. ‘I believe for everyone in public life that transparency is crucial.’
‘I put it out there. It’s on the internet for anybody to see,’ she said of her DNA test findings. ‘People can make of it what they will.’
Warren, 69, is a leader on the Democratic Party’s left-wing faction and a fierce critic of Wall Street whose potential as a Trump-spearing 2020 White House contender forced the long-simmering issue of her family history to the surface.
Warren (top right) is part of a growing field of potential Democratic presidential nominees that also includes (from top left) former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Cory Booker, Senator Kamala Harris; and (from bottom left) Senator Sherrod Brown, Senator Bernie Sanders, Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
President Trump has made hay of the controversy, calling Warren ‘Pocahontas’ when she was a surrogate for his presidential rival Hillary Clinton.
‘Goofy Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to as Pocahontas because she faked the fact she is native American, is a lowlife!’ he tweeted as the Republican primary season wrapped up in May 2016.
Her ultimate response in October 2018 as Trump continued to taunt her during public rallies made some Democrats raise questions about her political agility.
Critics say Warren used a hint of Indian background to justify classifying herself as a minority during her law school teaching career, in order to gain preferential hiring treatment.
Law schools at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have disputed that claim.
Warren did, however, listed herself for 10 years as a minority in directories maintained by the Association of American Law Schools, beginning in 1986. That period of time stretched from the year before Penn hired her to the year after Harvard Law School lured her away.
Trump said of Warren (left) during an October campaign rally in Montana: ‘She has so little Indian blood – well, she has none – that I cannot call her Pocahontas anymore’
She told reporters during her first Senate campaign in 2012 that, ‘I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am.’
Still, Trump has mocked her for years, calling her ‘Pocahontas’ and a ‘fake Indian.’
He offered her a $1 million reward if she took a DNA test and it proved she was an American Indian. After taking the test, she told Trump in a tweet that he could write it to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.
The New England Historic Genealogical Society reported in 2012 that it had unearthed a 1894 document suggesting Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was at least partially Native American.
It turned out the society had found a family newsletter that described a marriage license application, but hadn’t seen that document.
The conservative Breitbart News website later tracked down the marriage license and certificate and found that a column on both marked ‘race’ was left blank.
Warren had de-emphasized her Cherokee lineage since winning her Senate seat in 2012, but the president’s use of the issue to marginalize her was always expected to become a flashpoint if the two were to go head-to-head in 2020.
While Trump’s rally crowds eagerly lap up his snarks about ‘Pocahontas,’ Trump has used the polarizing nickname in at least one cringe-worthy moment at the White House.
In November 2017 he slipped it into a speech during an event honoring Navajo ‘Code Talkers’ who had used their native language as an unbreakable secret code to protect American military communications during World War II.
Asked minutes later during a press briefing why the president would use ‘offensive’ language at such an event, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders shot back: ‘I think what most people find offensive is Senator Warren lying about her heritage to advance her career.’