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Yesterday (September 24, 2012), Elizabeth Warren responded to Scott Brown's attack on her heritage by putting out an ad in which she rhetorically asks "What kid would?" ask her parents for documentation of her Native heritage.

Ms. Warren? Here's my answer. A Native kid who is part of her Nation would, that's who!

From her childhood, my kid knew what it meant to be Native, not in a "family lore" way like Elizabeth Warren, but in a day-in-and-day-out way where being a member or citizen of Nambe carries a responsibility to the Native community.

Several hundred years ago, our ancestors fought for our rights as nations. They prevailed in the face of enormous onslaughts of military might, but, they prevailed.

Our responsibility is to continue that fight.

Will you join us in that fight? Right now, your statements undermine our sovereignty.

And, by the way, since you have no idea what it means to be a citizen of a Native Nation, your outrage at Scott Brown's staff for their war whoops and tomahawk chops is superficial.

I'm a Democrat who makes phone calls and knocks on doors. I supported you until I learned of your claims. No more, Ms. Warren. My strongest allegiance is to my ancestors and the status of Native Nations. There are things you could do to regain my support and maybe the support of other Native people who have questioned what you are doing. And you know what sucks (pardon my use of that word)? Democrats need you to win your race so that things we care about are more attainable.

Scott Brown? You're as ignorant and racist as they come. You don't know what Native Americans look like.

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At the end of May, I wrote about Elizabeth Warren (running for US Senate against incumbent Scott Brown) and her family story about how they are part Cherokee.

Last night was the first debate between Warren and Brown. The first thing Scott Brown brought up was Warren's identity. He said "Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color. And as you can see, she's not."

Scott Brown's ignorance is showing!

Brown's remark suggests that a blue-eyed blonde could not be American Indian. He is wrong about that. 

Being a tribally enrolled member or citizen of a federally recognized tribe is what matters (and yes, there is a lot of debate about federal recognition and state recognition). Is Native identity determined by skin color? Nope. Hair color? Nope. Obviously, his idea of what an American Indian should look like is based on stereotypes!

The Cherokee Nation has several videos about being a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Here's one:



As the video demonstrates, Cherokee's "look" lots of different ways with regard to hair and skin color.

Scott Brown ought to watch that video!

And maybe he should read Cynthia Leitich Smith's short story, "A Real-Live Blond Cherokee and His Equally Annoyed Soul Mate" in Moccasin Thunder, edited by Lori Marie Carlson.

There's a lot of ignorance in America (around the world, in fact) about who American Indians are, but there are a lot of outstanding children's and young adult books that can unseat that ignorance. Moccasin Thunder has short stories by several leading Native writers: Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, Richard Van Camp, Linda Hogan, Joseph Bruchac, Greg Sarris, Lee Francis, and Susan Power. Pick it up today. Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown could learn a lot by reading it.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the problems Obama is currently facing. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

It is going to be difficult for the President to give us an uplifting State of the Union message next week, because it is in effect going to have to be a confession of the state of the Obama presidency.

Between the attempted bombing on Christmas Day which has become something like Obama’s Katrina, Martha Coakley’s humiliating defeat in MA (and the symbolic extinguishment of the Kennedy torch), and the inauguration of a new era of presidential-press relations in which even the liberal media has turned against their hero, Obama has a very difficult task to perform on Wednesday night. A successful speech requires an accurate diagnosis of what has gone wrong for this presidency. So let’s examine the attempted bombing, Coakley, and the media in turn for the lessons they offer to the President.

The Christmas bombing and Coakley’s defeat in MA are related. (Her poll numbers dropped precipitously after Christmas.) The attempted Christmas bombing reinforced the perception that not only was the administration not focusing on job creation, now there was evidence that it had taken its eye off the ball on homeland security. The President must give us reason again to believe that he has his priorities right, and he has his eye on the target – jobs. To some extent he’s already smartened up. Knowing that the President cannot turn around the jobless numbers any time soon, his advisers have told him to get out to show people that he feels our pain. And that’s why Obama has tuned back in, and on recent days has been on the road to vindicate populist rage at Wall Street. He should be mindful though that he is the President, not a traveling salesman.

Why didn’t Obama’s last minute campaigning for Coakley make a positive difference? Well, his comment about Scott Brown and his truck didn’t help, a mistake he should have learnt after his remarks last year in San Francisco about bitter people clinging on to their guns. There is nothing like liberal condescension that turns off Republicans and Independents, and the President needs to show humility and contrition in his speech on Wednesday.

There is an endemic sense in the media that Massachussetts. Yet to give to one state the power to speak for the nation is patently at odds with our constitution, though it would seem that our pundits prefer to give weight to statistical sampling over constitutional propriety. Even liberal journalists are turning against him now, because no one will stand forever for the losing team, liberal bias or not. Obama has to stay focused on the big picture, remembering that while Massachusetts spoke, the nation did not. His job on Wednesday is not to be lost in non-generalizable minutiae, but to inform us of the State of the Union.

So here’s the good news. For all the spate of unfortunate events the Obama administration had to endure since Christmas, it is still a golden rule of politics that no president polls well when the economy is in the doldrums, so it may have been this

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