Talk about a cringe.
On New Year’s Eve, Sen. Elizabeth Warren live streamed on Instagram shortly after announcing that she is forming an exploratory committee to ponder a run for president in 2020 (we’re going to go out on a limb here and say she’s 100% in).
The session was just, uh, weird.
The scene opened in a kitchen. “If you hear gnawing in the background, that’s because Bailey is in the kitchen,” Warren said and swung the camera toward a dog on the floor. “Say hello, yeah, yeah,” she said, petting the dog. “He said something with his tail, that’s who he is. Yes. Sweet boy. That’s our Bailey. That’s our Bailey. And Bailey wags his tail.”
Warren, 69, said, “Hold on a second, I’m going to get me, um —” Then she pointed off screen to the refrigerator “— a beer.” The Massachusetts Democrat slapped her thigh then disappeared. Bottles clanked, then she returned with a brown bottle, twisting off the top. “My husband Bruce is now here. You want a beer?” she asks. He passes.
Then she takes a quaff of brew and leans into the camera. “Who do we have here. Skyler? And 14 others? Hello? Denise? Hi.”
Ugh. The whole escapade seemed an obvious attempt to “get hip,” to follow some younger stars of the Democratic Party, like 29-year-old former bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Texas Rep. Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, cast by the mainstream media as the second coming of JFK.
Watch the video below:
But the internet was not kind.
One person wrote: “Real beer or 1/1024 alcohol beer?”
Laura L. Wilson wrote: “So far, we have Warren cracking a beer in her kitchen, O’Rourke popping champagne in an igloo, and Gillibrand baking a berry crumble, all on Instagram live. How much of this shameless pandering will we have to endure? Thank goodness for Bernie, can you imagine him doing this?”
Her hometown newspaper, The Boston Globe, didn’t much fancy the stunt either, with one columnist penning a pice headlined, “Elizabeth Warren racks up another Dukakis moment.”
The most authentic thing about the video, in fact, was its bogusness: Warren once again trying to pretend she is something she is not.
This time, an average beer-drinking American. Warren looked about as natural as former President Barack Obama in that awkward “Beer Summit” after he insulted the Cambridge cop.
Before she was Liz Six-Pack, she was a Cherokee. But that claim was somewhat undercut by her own belated revelation that she apparently has less American Indian blood than the average American. Not the effect she was going for with her pre-presidential announcement last October, when she unveiled the DNA test that suggested she had a Native American ancestor 10 generations ago — undermining her tale about how her parents were forced to elope due to anti-Indian bigotry, not to mention her own decision to claim minority status as a law professor when she was trying to get hired at Harvard. That blunder had even The New York Times and The Boston Globe rolling their eyes and suggesting she spare the Democratic Party any further embarrassment.
No wonder President Trump can’t wait for her to run.
