Am I right in thinking there's no high-profile Dem Trump would rather face, given how he roused hatred of Hillary even (especially?) among women voters?

But notice that Republicans have never done this? The attacks on Warren have always been 100% shouting “Pocohontas!” Even though she’s a wingnut socialist, they don’t challenge her on policy.

And the reason for that is that her plans to give away goodies to the middle class and slap around Wells Fargo are enormously popular even with deplorables. They don’t actually give a rip about deregulation, they’re totally on board with sticking it to big corporations and forgiving student loans.

This is the same problem Fox News has with AOC, her list of policies actually sounded pretty good to Fox viewers. Fox had a real tough time trying to scare people with her socialist giveaways, instead they’re going after her because she wore a fancy outfit at a photoshoot.

tl;dr, the power of self-interest is tough to beat and Dems need to focus on that.

I thought the controversy wasn't so much whether or not she was 1/256th Cherokee, but that she used that fact to get into Rutgers and land a sweet appointment at Harvard. Ancestry.com can't say anything about how she gamed the system to get tenure.

Just have a huge ****show clown car primary with 30 challengers and let natural selection take it's course. Worked for republicans.

I seriously think Trump should just jump into the Dem primaries too. You just know he would win. Or at least get enough delegates to make the convention watchable.

This is going to happen and Avenatti will be one of the final three. If he talks about expanding SCOTUS (I believe he's said so in the past?) and no other candidate does it's going to make him pretty appealing.

FWIW I think the true Trump analogue is Cuban (straight down to the game show host comparison), but I don't think he will run.

I don’t see how that’s much of a scandal if she was telling the truth. The scandal was always supposed to be that she lied to get preferential treatment.

If the Dems had any brains (or cared about winning more than looking "credible" to big donors) they would literally abandon the primary process and run it 100% like american idol. Clinton can even be simon cowell if she likes. Lunatics vs Real candidates open auditions chosen by a 4 person panel (with buzzers) then when they've got like 50 candidates have a weekly show where the public can phone in to vote candidates out. I guarantee the eventual winner would become president 100% of the time.

lol like facts are going to stop them.

To the contrary, nothing will placate conservatives quite like the revelation that a candidate has a mixed racial lineage.

What? They're not going to stop. Yelling racist **** and telling racist jokes is like what unites the right. No DNA test was ever going to get them to give up their fun, they were always going to lean into it, not even because they had any keen sense it was effective but because of how giddy it makes them.

Sure, I don’t think this is an epic killshot for Warren that stops Trump in his track, it’s more just a cool way to informally kick off her campaign by dunking on Trump.

Hell, I won’t be surprised if Trump ignores his opponent entirely and runs on an anti-Hillary LOCK HER UP campaign.

This is all these idiots are going to talk about, if Warren is the nominee they'll just concoct same crazy stories about how she stole public monies by being Pocahontas the Fake Indian, none of it will be verifiable or reality based in any way, it won't matter a bit though. Instead of LOCK HER UP it will be SCALP HER or whatever thing they think is so funny and snarky, and it will be down to the discretion of like ~25 editors and assignment editors how much it's amplified and given wall-to-wall coverage to the exclusion of anything else. I have no idea what they will decide but I wouldn't say I am confident they won't absolutely dive in head first in Fake Indian stuff, you'd go broke betting sanity will prevail, I mean that Ed Whelan's doppleganger theory on Kavanaugh went from the hilarious insane ramblings on Twitter to like Official Republican Orthodoxy in a week, there's no reason they won't be able to pretend Elizabeth Warren did the 2008 banking collapse by doing a rain dance.

WARREN RESPONDS TO FRAUD CLAIMS


5 hand wringing paragraphs later

_{The claims against warren come from unknown and unverified sources with very little tangible evidence however...}

The real power here is not labeling mainline center-left proposals "socialism" to gain CTH cred at the cost of alienating everyone below the 90th percentile of political literacy.

I probably would vote for any person in the Democratic primary before I would vote for Avennati. He would be my absolute last choice, or perhaps tied for my last choice if Cuomo ran.

This ftw.

The bolded is true for any attacks on the Dem candidate though, isn't it? The important disadvantage for Warren seems to be that she will mobilize the misogyinist deplorables who might have lost faith in Trump. But as you can see with the Kavanaugh hearings, it is pretty easy to find something not related to the candidate to get those people motivated.

Warren's big plus compared to someone like Hillary Clinton is that she won't be as milquetoast in answering attakcs against her ("go to the fact checkers on my website"), but is able to get a coherent message across without seeming like someone too much on the fringe.

Warren also seems to have a grasp on central economic issues without alienating more "culture issue" focussed groups on the left. As the Beto thing doesn't seem to be happening, I would look at her the most favorably if I was a US democrat.

Pains me to say as Warren is probably my favorite politician, but this seems like a blunder to me.

Zero chance this will slow down the Pocohontas attack line. On the contrary, it gives republicans a new talking point with the 1/1,024th thing. They will use that relentlessly.

But more importantly, it solidifies the first association people have with Warren as this Native American thing rather than as a progressive or as a fighter for the working class or whatever. Remember, most people still have only a vague idea of who she is, at best.

And setting aside her own calculations here, bringing up another race-based culture war debate can't be helpful for democrats going into a midterm. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something but the whole thing seems like an unforced error to me.

I’m not sure what alternative Warren had. I don’t think she had the option to just no-sell this like Trump being asked for his tax returns. Best just to rip the bandage off and maximize the extent to which this is old news by 2020 IMO.

That said, if she actually thought she would score points with the $1M thing, that’s obviously pretty stupid. But I don’t think the decision was regrettable overall.

The brilliance of Republican politicians: Company owned by Kevin McCarthy's in-laws won $7 million in federal contracts based on claiming Cherokee heritage (they are not Cherokee)

And McCarthy helped him:

Yet it's Elizabeth Warren this issue follows everywhere

Worth pointing out Trump has claimed his father was born in Germany multiple times (he wasn't, he was born in NYC). But you'd be hard-pressed for anyone remember Trump has lied repeatedly about this. Just page 39 news, there's senile old coot Donald Trump saying brazenly false stuff again.

Democrats fundamental problem is that the refs in this game, namely the media, hold them duty bound to care deeply about some right-wing distortions of the truth that the right-wingers concoct ("Elizabeth Warren is a Pretend Indian and used it to win millions of dollars in Affirmative Action Salary from Harvard") and amplify this as a Big Problem and Big Concern for voters and devote wall-to-wall coverage to this dumb ****.

The only reason any of us are here doing any of this is that elite media, not backwater swamps but elite media just concern troll for the right again and again: well, people are saying this crazy ****, you better respond or else they threaten

Exactly. It's just like the Hillary email story. It's of minimal importance but because it's a democrat who doesn't have much baggage otherwise, it's hammered over and over again by both the right AND the media until you get the infamous EMAILS word cloud.

Honestly, it's a tough problem and I don't know what the ideal counter is but making it a big story like Warren did today seems like the wrong approach to me as it plays into their hands and lets the narrative define her. Attacking the media for it seems like it could work better: Trump has 10 worse scandals than this every day, why the **** are you wasting everyone's time asking me about this for the millionth time?

Not saying that will work, either, but engaging in the nitty gritty details can't possibly be right.