The initial headline sounded good: Senator Elizabeth Warren had a DNA test done and it proved that she does have some Indian ancestors. For years she's been haunted by the fact that in her early career she was listed as Native American despite looking whiter than white.
The problem was in the details. Yes, a researcher found some evidence of Indian ancestry but it was much further back than she'd been claiming. Rather than her mother being related to two modern tribes, the DNA analysis showed that the apparent Indian ancestor was six to ten generations back, far too distant to affect her mother's status. Further, there is very little DNA mapping from North American tribes so the analyst used Mexican and Peruvian DNA as a proxy. So all we really know is that, like most European/Americans, Warren had a distant ancestor who was from somewhere in the Americas. That's a long way from proving the Cherokee ancestry she'd originally claimed.
So the initial story was favorable but the follow-ups will continue to haunt her. She took a vague, unsubstantiated claim (every family has those) and proved it wrong while claiming it proved her right. In doing so, she brought the whole false claim back into the news cycle. What had been old news became news again.
And she did it three weeks before an election where the Democrats can't afford any further distractions angering Democratic campaign professionals across the country. It also gave President Trump a chance to dig her on her Indian claim yet again. By the end of the day she was sending out angry tweets, sounding more like Hillary Clinton than the high-minded icon she pretends to be.
This proves that A) Warren is running for president, B) she's already reacting to Trump rather than forcing him to react to her, C) her timing and judgement are really poor.
Six years ago she was widely followed. Her line about corporations not accomplishing things on their own was so powerful that Barack Obama appropriated it with his "you didn't build this" line in the 2012 campaign. Two years ago Bernie Sanders was seen as the consolation candidate after Warren decided not to run. But those days are past. She's no longer widely quoted. She's forced to do stunts like her "saving capitalism act" (an example of really bad economic policy) and releasing a genetic study that shows she's no more Native American than most whites.
Warren still has a decent shot at the nomination but there's no way she can defeat President Trump.
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