Why Elizabeth Warren needs to give "the speech"

It’s undeniable that Elizabeth Warren’s formal presidential campaign announcement on Saturday was deflated by the news, which broke just days before, that she had described herself as “American Indian” on her application to the Texas bar in 1986. This wasn’t a bombshell. It has long been known that Warren had for years, on and off, identified herself as Native American, in keeping with family legends about Cherokee and Delaware ancestors. Yet for some, actually seeing that seemingly bizarre claim in Warren’s own 32-year-old handwriting was the end of the line. In the middle of a desire to exorcize the Democratic Party’s racist past, as well as the need to find a presidential candidate whose mistakes won’t provide Trump with a ready-made script of mockery (one that, in Warren’s case, is already much-practiced by our president), more than a few Democrats seem prepared to declare her candidacy prematurely over. She’s damaged goods, this line of thinking goes, no matter how great her ideas are.

In response to this skepticism, some suggest that Warren’s best (and perhaps only) option is to stay away from her past and lock away her family stories, and instead focus her campaign entirely on her attacks on the 1 percent and her proposals for structural economic reforms. But there is a better alternative. It is risky, and the odds of Warren being able to pull it off are, I admit, not very good. But still, the rewards—both for her candidacy and, for those of us who mostly agree with her diagnosis of American capitalism in 2019, for the country—would be great.