RUTHFULLY YOURS

In October the senator pretended to be vindicated by a DNA test which suggested a distant Native American ancestor but also left open the possibility that she has less Native American heritage than the average white person in the U.S. By the Warren standard, there are few people who couldn’t claim some connection to a historically oppressed group, which could render such questions meaningless. This column has therefore been doubtful that Ms. Warren can persuade Democratic primary voters to affirm the end of identity politics by selecting her as their presidential candidate.

For now, the political damage to a potential Warren candidacy appears to be significant. Astead Herndon writes in the New York Times:

… nearly two months after Ms. Warren released the test results and drew hostile reactions from prominent tribal leaders, the lingering cloud over her likely presidential campaign has only darkened. Conservatives have continued to ridicule her. More worrisome to supporters of Ms. Warren’s presidential ambitions, she has yet to allay criticism from grass-roots progressive groups, liberal political operatives and other potential 2020 allies who complain that she put too much emphasis on the controversial field of racial science — and, in doing so, played into Mr. Trump’s hands…

Three people close to senior members of Ms. Warren’s team, who were granted anonymity to speak freely on the issue, said they were “shocked” and “rattled” by the senator’s decision to take the DNA test, which they described as an unequivocal misstep that could have lasting consequences, even on 2020 staffing. One former adviser, who also asked not to be named, called it a “strategic failure” that was “depressing and unforgettable.”

Former Warren advisers aren’t the only ones who are not forgetting, according to the Times report:

Twila Barnes, a Cherokee genealogist who has thoroughly tracked Ms. Warren’s claims of native ancestry since it became national news in 2012, said her “jaw was on the floor” when she saw Ms. Warren’s decision to take the DNA test, and the slick video that accompanied the announcement of the results.

Ms. Barnes said Ms. Warren had an opportunity to teach the broader public about how genetic testing has historically been used as a weapon against Native communities, but instead she “helped perpetuate a very dangerous idea.”

It has pushed Ms. Barnes, a self-described liberal, to make something of a personal pledge: She will never vote for Ms. Warren under any circumstance, including in an election against Mr. Trump.

The Times report notwithstanding, this column figures that NeverWarren Democrats will never get as much media attention as NeverTrump Republicans, even if the former end up being more numerous.

If Ms. Warren is rejected for a lack of authenticity, it’s a standard that may prove challenging to other candidates as well. Paul Bedard writes today in the Washington Examiner that Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D., Tex.), despite losing a Senate race last month, has surged into a tie with Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) as the Democrats most likely to beat Mr. Trump, according to a betting website. The Journal’s Reid J. Epstein and Janet Hook reported this week that Mr. O’Rourke has a remarkably enthusiastic following among county Democratic party leaders in Iowa.

Mr. O’Rourke is celebrated not as an authentic winner, but as an “authentically cool” overachiever who managed to lose a close race to incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz in a state that reliably votes Republican.

Some of the relevant math makes it harder to view Mr. O’Rourke’s vote total as an electoral overachievement. Patrick Svitek notes this week in the Texas Tribune:

U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, ultimately raised over $80 million in his unsuccessful bid… Cruz’s final tally was less than half that — $38.9 million — and came through his campaign as well as two affiliated groups.

Mr. O’Rourke’s well-funded campaign famously rejected money from political action committees. But that doesn’t mean the committees weren’t free to spend money on their own. Maggie Severns writes in Politico:

A super PAC that appeared shortly before the November election and spent $2.3 million attacking Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was funded by Washington Democrats, election spending disclosures revealed for the first time on Thursday… But because Texas Forever launched in the days just before the midterms, it was able to avoid naming its donors until a month after the vote, a tactic that became increasingly popular with super PACs this year. Senate Majority PAC declined to comment.

Texas Forever spent its funds helping Cruz’s opponent, Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.), a proponent of campaign finance reform who decries the influence of money in politics.

It seems that Mr. O’Rourke’s authentic views on the issue have evolved. In September Clare Malone wrote at the FiveThirtyEight website:

O’Rourke hasn’t always been allergic to PAC money. He won his first congressional election by defeating an eight-term Democratic incumbent. In that campaign, O’Rourke used money from a super PAC bent on prying longtime representatives from their seats. O’Rourke’s father-in-law, a wealthy real estate developer, gave the PAC $18,750 after maxing out his personal donation to the campaign.

In his most recent campaign, some questioned why Mr. O’Rourke calls himself Beto. In March Alfredo Corchado wrote in the Dallas Morning News that the nickname was the result of a political calculation in El Paso, although not one made by the candidate:

O’Rourke was born in prestige, lived a charmed life, raised in an upper-class lifestyle by people accustomed to power — a sharp contrast to that of a mostly Mexican-American, hardscrabble city where workers still barely make ends meet…

In the backdrop of the city’s multicultural community, his father, Pat O’Rourke, a consummate politician, once explained why he nicknamed his son Beto: Nicknames are common in Mexico and along the border, and if he ever ran for office in El Paso, the odds of being elected in this mostly Mexican-American city were far greater with a name like Beto than Robert Francis O’Rourke.

Voters may struggle to discern Mr. O’Rourke’s authentic views. Ms. Malone observed in September:

O’Rourke is going out of his way not to bust up his hopes with Texas’s independent voters, who, in that red state, might tend toward the more conservative end of the political spectrum (52 percent of the state’s independent voters chose Trump in the 2016 election). His rhetoric of togetherness seems clearly aimed at this demographic. “You cannot be too much of a Republican, you can’t be too blue of a Democrat, too much of an independent. You can’t be in prison for too many years, you can’t be too undocumented to be worth fighting for. It is for everyone,” O’Rourke said of his campaign in a speech this summer. His earnest varnish is polished to its highest shine. When baited with questions that could easily lead to Trump-bashing, O’Rourke instead talks about the importance of having “unguarded moments with one another.”