Elizabeth Warren has been steadily rising in polling over
the past few months, but her success has attracted some unwanted attention in
the form of a skeleton emerging from her closet. On the campaign trail, Warren
has often described how she was fired from her teaching position in 1971 because
she was pregnant. Now, new evidence has emerged that suggests that the story is
false.
The Washington
Free Beacon reported that the minutes of the Riverdale N.J. Board of
Education showed that Warren was unanimously offered an extension of her
two-days-per-week speech pathologist job for a second year. At another board
meeting two months later, the minutes record that Warren’s resignation was "accepted
with regret." Fast-forward to 2019 and Warren says that’s her story and
she’s sticking to it.
"All I know is I was 22-years-old, I was 6 months
pregnant, and the job that I had been promised for the next year was going to
someone else. The principal said they were going to hire someone else for my
job," Warren told CBS
News on Monday.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight tweeted of Warren’s new scandal,
“It's interesting that it's circulating on both conservative Twitter and Bernie
Twitter but getting almost no mainstream pickup.” This is perhaps unsurprising
since Warren seems to be the favorite du jour of the progressive left, which
includes many mainstream media outlets and journalists.
In a separate article, FiveThirtyEight
analyzed Warren’s rise in the polls. Recent polling has shown that the
Massachusetts senator’s support has begun to broaden beyond her liberal base to
Democratic moderates and (relatively speaking) conservatives. She is also making
gains among white voters without college degrees and black voters, two groups
with which she has struggled.
“To be clear, Biden is still leading in the polls, but the
distance between him and Warren has narrowed considerably,” writes Geoffrey
Skelley of FiveThirtyEight. “There’s still a lot of progress left for Warren to
make, particularly among voters of color, but for now, her trajectory for the
2020 Democratic nomination is moving in the right direction — up.”
It’s too early to tell whether PregnantTeacherGate will
affect Warren’s upward trajectory but the misstatement of basic facts about her
personal history leads to questions about her credibility. This is especially true
in light of her previous false statements about her Native American ancestry.
In any other election, Warren’s fact-challenged biography
might be a bigger problem, but in 2020 the other two frontrunners also have
serious problems with the truth. Her chief competition for the Democratic
nomination, Joe Biden, often has senior moments that seem to border on senility
while President Trump’s factual missteps have achieved legendary status. I have
to wonder whether truth will play a significant role in next year’s elections
or whether America has moved beyond objective reality to a post-truth society.
Originally published on The
Resurgent
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