As Elizabeth Warren Rises, the G.O.P. Deploys an Old Tactic
An email from the Republican National Committee on Tuesday offered a clear preview of how the party would seek to undermine her if she becomes the Democratic nominee: “It’s not just her heritage Fauxcahontas has been lying about to get ahead,” the subject line said. A spokeswoman for the committee, Liz Harrington, said on Wednesday, “Like her false claim of Native American status, this is another example of Warren seemingly shifting the facts of her life story for personal gain.” (Ms. Warren has said she did not advance her career by identifying herself as Native American, an assertion backed up by an extensive Boston Globe investigation.)
“The more examples like this that surface, the more it will stick with voters that this is someone who cannot be trusted,” Ms. Harrington said.“One of Senator Warren’s great strengths is her ability to connect her biography to her record to her plans for the future,” he said. “That gets undermined if she can’t rely on her biography as the foundation of that progression.”
All year, Ms. Warren has framed her personal story to voters as one of perseverance, focusing on her upbringing in Oklahoma, her family’s financial struggles and her winding path to an eventual career as a law professor. Voters often praise her biographical story as a powerful part of her pitch, which centers on bringing about big change to an economic and political system that she describes as rigged against ordinary people.
As part of that story, Ms. Warren tells crowds that at the end of her first year as a public-school teacher, she was “visibly pregnant” and lost her job. A retired teacher from Ms. Warren’s school in New Jersey told CBS News, “The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant.”Ms. Warren told CBS News that she had not revealed her pregnancy when the contract was approved, and that two months later, when she was showing, the principal told her that she would not be welcomed back. Addressing the 2007 interview, she said: “After becoming a public figure I opened up more about different pieces in my life and this was one of them.”
The attacks are the latest evidence of how Republicans are reviving tactics Mr. Trump used to caricature Mrs. Clinton, whom he branded as “Crooked Hillary,” as dishonest.Attacking authenticity has been a common strategy targeting women running for office for decades: Long before Mrs. Clinton, Geraldine Ferraro faced it in 1984, when she was the first woman to appear on a major party’s presidential ticket.
“This is a tried and true tactic when it comes to women candidates and elected officials, because women pay a much higher price when their honesty and integrity is called into question,” said Amanda Hunter, research and communications director at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which supports women in politics.
“Our research shows that voters historically give women what we call a virtue advantage, but then the other side of that is they punish them for any real or manufactured ethical infraction,” she said. “And once women are knocked off that pedestal, it’s a lot more difficult for them to climb all the way back up.”