WASHINGTON — There’s a ghost haunting Elizabeth Warren as she ramps up for a possible 2020 presidential bid and a reelection campaign in Massachusetts this year: her enduring and undocumented claims of Native American ancestry.

Signaling more problems than Democrats suppose with Elizabeth Warren as their standard-bearer, the Boston Globe has done a long piece on Warren's erroneous claim to Native American heritage and why that's a problem, writing .

Warren says now, as she has from the first days of her public life, that she based her assertions on family lore, on her reasonable trust in what she was told about her ancestry as a child. “I know who I am,” she said in a recent interview with the Globe. But that self-awareness may not be enough, as her political ambitions blossom. She’s taken flak from the right for years as a “fake Indian,” including taunts from President Trump, who derisively calls her “Pocahontas.’’ That clamor from the right will only grow with her increasing prominence.

The problem with the Globe piece is that they think it's just about political cat-calling from her opponents and that the actual problem from that is that it will get in the way to her march to the presidency.

Among the people quoted, many say Warren could clear the air by apologizing for her mistaken claim to Indian heritage. "If she just apologizes, it would go away," said one person quoted.

Actually, it's a problem of what Warren did, not what she claimed, that would make an apology pretty cheesy and insignificant.

Warren used her phony claims to being Indian to secure an advantage over real Native Americans in her academic career, using her claims to Indian heritage to secure first a University of Pennsylvania law professorship and then a Harvard law professorship. According to National Review:

She listed herself as a minority on a legal directory reviewed by deans and hiring committees. The University of Pennsylvania “listed her as a minority faculty member,” and she was touted after her hire at Harvard Law School as, yes, the school’s “first woman of color.”





The backdrop to this was that universities were under intense pressure, from protests and more, to hire minorities. Like the house-flipper she is, Warren saw her opportunity to profit from gaming the system and she took it.

That Warren would do this is somewhat on the level of what Rachel Dolezal did in claiming to be black, but at least Dolezal didn't use that phony claim to secure privileges so far as is known, she just liked to live the fantasy. Warren on the other hand used it as a means to advance.

And it wasn't just for any advancement, it was advancement done at the expense of real Native Americans, depriving a real Native American law professor of that Harvard slot. Now she says she's all interested in helping Indians - with welfare checks, just not Harvard professorships.

It underlines the moral bankruptcy of affirmative action, showing that it's just another vehicle for white opportunists to advance, something they would not be able to do otherwise, in addition to being harmful for minorities in themselves.

And that is what the Boston Globe fails to bring up even as it expends a long article on the issue. They fail to get to the heart of the problem which is that Warren used invented Indian heritage not just for fantasy's sake but to one-up her competition. It's the sign of an unscrupulous gamer and it needs to be called out for that alone.