Elizabeth Warren is the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Massachusetts. She is challenging the incumbent republican Senator Scott Brown. The contest has considerable political resonance since the senate seat was held for decades by the late Ted Kennedy.

In the special election following Kennedy's death in 2009, the contest was won by a local politician, best known for posing nude as "America's sexiest man" for a "Cosmopolitan Magazine" centerfold in 1982, and for driving a pickup truck. He became the first republican elected to a senate seat in Massachusetts since Edward Brooke in 1972. 

 

Elizabeth Warren is a distinguished  Harvard Law School professor. She served as chair of the congressional oversight panel after the financial crisis of 2008, and later was an assistant to President Barack Obama, and special adviser to the Secretary of the Treasury.

She comes from Oklahoma. Her father was a janitor. Like Scott Brown she did not have an easy childhood. The problem for Elizabeth Warren is that she claimed to be a Native American. There is no sound evidence that she is. Harvard Law School called her "the one tenured minority women" on their faculty. 

She said she was part Cherokee. There are Cherokees in Oklahoma. They are the remnants of the Cherokees from Georgia, forced on the infamous "trail of tears" of 1838-1839, after they were dispossessed under the 1830 Indian Removal Act by President Andrew Jackson. Over one third died on the arduous trek from Georgia to Oklahoma.  

There were Native Americans at Harvard. Founded in 1636, Harvard had encountered financial problems, so that in 1650, when its charter was granted, the English "Society for  Propagation of the Gospel in New England," gathered funds for the education of Indian students. Five were admitted. One was awarded a degree, a Wampanoag from Martha's Vineyard. But all the Native Americans met untimely deaths, and in the1690s, Harvard petitioned to have the buildings torn down. It was not until 1997, that Harvard installed a plaque commemorating the existence of the "Indian College." . 

A commitment to diversity is admirable. Elizabeth Warren could have claimed she was a poor white girl who became a Harvard Law School professor. Instead she claimed what she was not, and Harvard used that claim to justify a quota which was fraudulent.