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Warren's goal was to eliminate the issue of his legacy of nervous Democrats and to show that she was ready, willing and able to stand up to President Donald Trump if and when the time came she was the party's candidate against him in 2020. The problem is that when you remove all the spark from his well-produced video, you end up with this: There is still no certainty that Warren is, of significantly, Native American.
Yes, Stanford geneticist Carlos Bustamante tells Warren in the video that "the facts suggest that you absolutely have a Native American ancestor in your pedigree". But estimates of the amount of blood that American Indians possess range from 1 / 64th to 1 / 1024th. Which, uh, is not much.
Trump himself raised this uncertainty in a series of tweets (of course) on Tuesday morning.
(Trump refers to this statement by Cherokee Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr .: "A DNA test is useless for determining tribal citizenship." Current DNA testing does not even allow us to determine whether the ancestors of a no one were indigenous to North or South America. ")
(This assertion is false on the facts available, there is no evidence that Warren was hired by Harvard Law School – or elsewhere – because she claimed minority status because of her Native American heritage.)
This is of course what Trump does. He intimidates – regardless of the facts. Ask yourself the following question: If Warren had produced a DNA test confirming that it was half American, do you think Trump would have simply conceded this point and moved on to something else? Of course not! He would almost certainly have sent a tweet similar to the one on Tuesday in which he alleged – without any proof – that the DNA test was "phony".
So, if Warren thought that this video and this DNA test would silence Trump, she was mistaken. But I guess neither Warren nor his campaign team thought so. Because they are not hopelessly naive.
My strong feeling is that Monday's entire presentation of the facts was aimed not at all Trump, but rather at Democratic activists and donors who probably expressed some level of nervousness directly to Warren about how the attack "Pocahontas "could be used against her by Trump as 2020. Do not forget that every political party is fighting for the last election again in the next election. And in the last election, the Democrats lost what they thought was safe because they named Hillary Clinton a man who had enough political baggage to fill a train car. Trump has exploited Clinton's baggage by often calling her a close relative to a non-convicted felon.
In this context, Warren's struggle to fully explain his own claims of Native American heritage – and the fact that it was not quite early when all this was announced in 2012 about from what she had told Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. minority status – is a concern for some Democrats. And this worry is something that Warren's possible Democratic opponents will focus on as they try to sow doubt among voters about whether the Massachusetts senator is the right person to choose to face Trump.
What Warren was trying to do with this video and this DNA test was then to show the other Democrats that she was ready to fight back and that she had the firepower to repel Trump's attacks. A good idea – in theory! But, in practice, things are not as good. Because Warren is not able to provide an answer on his Native American background that seems totally and completely pass the smells test.
Before her big Monday, we knew that she had told people that she was part of the Native Americans because her mother and her mother's family had told her so. Now, we have a geneticist who says "the facts to suggest"It has Native American origins and the estimate of the amount of Indian blood that Warren actually has varies greatly – and may not exceed 1 / 1024th.
This is not a certainty. Not near. And uncertainty remains something that can and will be exploited – by Trump publicly and by his possible Democratic opponents in quieter conversations with key donors and party activists.
This means that Warren's strategy boils down to momentum.
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