Sound familiar? Enter consumer protection champion Elizabeth Warren. Warren's political acuity was supposed to be as bulletproof as her biography: incredibly smart Harvard Law professor sees malfeasance in the credit card business, envisions an agency from the ground up, pushes it through a fiercely divided Congress and then is put in charge of overseeing its creation. Her story is one of good old-fashioned political gumption -- she can say she knows how to build something.

And yet, Warren's victory in the upcoming election against the incumbent Brown is far from assured. She's oscillated up and down in the polls, and last week she confronted her first full-blown political firestorm in the form of bizarre story about her distant Native American heritage> -- and whether or not she used her lineage for professional gain.

Putting the veracity of the accusations aside for a moment (we'll take her at her word that her claims to Cherokee ancestry are real and that she never leveraged her heritage inappropriately -- if either proves untrue, it will be a major scandal given the forcefulness of her statements), Warren's difficulty in handling such a peculiar yet potentially powerful kerfuffle bespeaks a real problem for her senate bid. For all of the skills she brings to her candidacy, is being a campaigner one of them?

Let's first consider the actual sequence of events that lead to the controversy. Initially, Warren said she claimed her minority status "because I thought I might be invited to meetings where I might meet more people who had grown up like I had grown up." Then she doubled-down in the most convoluted possible way on Thursday, saying:

I still have a picture on my mantel at home, and it's a picture of my mother's dad, a picture of my grandfather. And my Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least a 1,000 times remarked that he -- her father, my Papaw -- had high cheek bones like all of the Indians do. Because that is how she saw it and your mother got those same great cheek-bones and I didn't. She thought this was the bad deal she had gotten in life.

So what, huh? If we're getting technical, the Cherokee Nation sets its boundaries liberally and would allow someone who is 1/128th Cherokee to enroll (by contrast, Warren claims a 1/32nd connection), but the fact that we are even discussing such specifics signals a communications victory for the Brown campaign.

Warren's botched response has brought questions about her political skills to the surface. A lengthy article in the Boston Globe this weekend detailed how Boston's mayor Thomas Menino has been reticent about offering his endorsement to Warren, and even hinted at the possibility he could support Brown. While Menino has been notoriously coy in the past with endorsements, the longer he waits, the more Warren languishes without support from one of the key corners of the Massachusetts establishment.