Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Native’ disaster and other commentary

Political analyst: Elizabeth Warren’s Native Disaster

Elizabeth Warren crippled her likely 2020 presidential bid before it even began. So contends CNN’s Chris Cilliza, writing of the aftermath of an October video in which the Massachusetts senator took a DNA test to prove her American Indian heritage. The worst part for Warren: “This wound was entirely self-inflicted.” The genetic test, Cilliza notes, “didn’t clarify much of anything.” He adds: “Estimates that Warren possesses from 1/64th to 1/1024th Native American heritage — and those from people who were on Warren’s side! — didn’t help matters.” The point of the video had been to “get the issue off the table” after months of Trumpian mockery. Instead, the test and the video gave President Trump a fresh opening and brought “attention to a weak spot,” which is “never a good thing for a politician.”

Libertarian: Legal Drugs Can Stop Opioid Crisis

“For the second time in three years, US life expectancy has declined,” notes Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. One major culprit: overdoses stemming from fentanyl, a heroin substitute that is “50 times more potent” than the drug whose effects it’s supposed to emulate. Its sheer deadliness, McArdle argues, should prompt us to find “ways to make safe, reliable doses of opiates available to addicts who aren’t ready to stop.” Methadone clinics would be part of this solution, she says, “but lowering the death toll may well require a more drastic step: legalizing prescriptions of stronger opiates.” The downsides are undeniable, she concedes. “But when fentanyl took over the U.S. illicit drug markets, it also got a lot of addicts as hostages. We’ll never be able to rescue them unless we can first keep them alive long enough to be saved.”

From the left: Scientist Destroyed Women’s Careers

Media stories about the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s alleged depredations against women miss the “fact that the claims in question are not, actually, just about sexual misconduct,” writes Megan Garber in The Atlantic. Tyson allegedly took physical advantage of his victims, yes, but the claims also implicate the “harm that the alleged misconduct has done to their careers” — namely, “the smothered ambitions. The seeded self-doubts. The notion that careers can experience trauma, too.” One of his assistants, for example, recalls that after she confronted him about his sordid alleged advances, Tyson replied that the accuser “was too ‘distracting’ to succeed as a producer.” Garber concludes: “The stories of those who have lived in Tyson’s orbit have served as reminders that, here on Earth, we remain biased toward the stars.”

Strategist: Republicans Wasted Election on Caravan

The 2018 midterms were “not a base election,” writes David Winston in Roll Call. “Independents decided the outcome, breaking for Democrats by 12 points.” And that’s how Republicans blew it. Their winning issue, Winston says, was the stellar economy, as seen in the November jobs report that showed plummeting unemployment and rising wages, including working-class wages. Instead of focusing on these results, Republicans allowed the “combination of the immigration and the caravan issues” to dominate their messaging. By a 2-to-1 margin, voters heard a grim immigration message from the right, rather than a positive economic one. The lesson for 2020: “Republicans should refocus on the economy, their economic record, and solutions to household issues as first steps toward rebuilding their majority coalition for 2020.”

Albany watch: New York Politicos Make Manafort Blush

Disgraced GOP consigliere Paul Manafort created the revolving door between lobbying and political consulting in the 1980s, notes Ross Barkan in City & State New York. Today Manafort’s practices are under a media and law-enforcement lens, he says, but the same shenanigans are “generally accepted as the price of doing business in New York.” One “notorious practitioner is BerlinRosen, a consulting firm that does not register to lobby elected officials.” The firm is both “consultant of choice” for Mayor de Blasio and the “city’s most powerful developers.” The solution, Barkan suggests, is for New York Dems to “build a true firewall between consulting and lobbying.”

— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari