Sen. Elizabeth Warren, from the presidential campaign trail, has doubled down on her claim that she was fired from her first teaching job because she was visibly pregnant.
The takeaway from that sentence is the phrase “doubled down.”
Whenever a candidate for political office has to double down on something, it’s a clear sign there’s doubt in the air.
There are question marks to address.
There are — dare say — accusations of lying to confront.
And for Warren, who’s already been busily scrubbing the stain of Pocahontas from her polyester stretch leisure outfits, the last thing she needs is another question mark about her truth-telling.
Her trail of untruths stretches long.
“The Massachusetts Republican Party has sent out a scathing mailer accusing Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren of ’25 years of deception and cover-ups’ over the use of her Native American heritage,” MassLive.com wrote way back in October of 2012.
“It’s time for Elizabeth Warren to apologize for her Native American deception,” Legal Insurrection wrote in November of 2017.
“New evidence has emerged Elizabeth Warren claimed American Indian heritage in 1986 [when she] identified as ‘American Indian’ on a registration card for the State Bar of Texas,” Vox reported in February.
“Conservatives in Hollywood Blast Elizabeth Warren for Her Native-American Deception,” Lifezette wrote, also in February.
Sensing a theme?
Shortly after, the headlines changed to this: “Elizabeth Warren apologizes for calling herself Native American,” as The Washington Post wrote, in February.
“Elizabeth Warren apologizes to Native American audience,” as CNN wrote, in August.
And then the ultimate political concession — the carrot.
The dangling “vote for me” beg.
“Elizabeth Warren Offers a Policy Agenda for Native Americans,” The New York Times wrote, in August.
Now comes another curious inconsistency.
From Fox: “Several times on the campaign trail, Warren suggested that she was effectively fired from a school where she taught children with special needs because she was ‘visibly pregnant.’ However, in a 2007 interview, Warren appeared to have left on her own accord.”
By her own statements, in 2007, Warren said that she worked with children with disabilities in a public school — “and then that summer, I actually didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an ’emergency certificate,’ it was called.”
Warren continued: “I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out for me. I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple years, and I was really casting about thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’ ”
By those words, it sounds as if Warren didn’t have the proper credentials to continue the teaching job, went back to school to get them, had a “thanks, but no thanks moment,” and decided to pursue something else — since she was pregnant anyway.
But to CBS, earlier this week, Warren doubled down on her campaign remarks that she had been effectively fired from her teaching position for the crime of being pregnant.
“All I know is I was 22 years old, I was six months pregnant, and the job that I had been promised for the next year was going to someone else,” she said, on CBS. “The principal said they were going to hire someone else for the job.”
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
Employers tell job applicants all the time that they’ve selected someone else for the position.
That’s hardly one and the same as being unfairly fired.
And no matter how Warren’s campaign might spin it — and spin they have, offering up the lame remark that Warren has learned to “open up” since becoming a public figure — the fact is, this candidate, this senator from Massachusetts, has a problem with truth-telling.
It’s one that’s plagued her for years.
It’s one that continues to plague her.
And it’s one that voters ought to wonder — rightly so — if it’s a permanent facet of her character and moral compass.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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