Senator Elizabeth Warren has a long history of embellishing her past. Most Americans focus on her lies about being Native American as a reason to distrust her. But the folks over at the Washington Free Beacon have discovered another reason why she may not be the most trustworthy candidate. Apparently, Warren has been, to use some Beltway talk, "lacking in candor" about getting fired from a teaching job for being visibly pregnant.
Free Beacon's Colin Anderson snooped through Riverdale, New Jersey's board of education meeting minutes from 1971, Warren's second year as a teacher. According to Anderson, "the board voted unanimously on a motion to extend Warren a "2nd year" contract for a two-days-per-week teaching job." But then, records from a "board meeting held two months later, on June 16, 1971, indicate that Warren’s resignation was 'accepted with regret.'"
Anderson notes, "Warren's claim that she was dismissed after her first year of teaching because she was pregnant has become a cornerstone of her stump speeches." As reported by Mediaite, Warren recently told a campaign audience the following story:
“I still remember the 4 to 6-year-olds, I still remember the faces of every one of them,” Warren said. “I remember some of our lessons, the things we worked on, I remember our successes, and our failures. I loved that work, and I would probably still be doing in that work today, but my story has some more turns.”
“By the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant, and the principal did what principals did in those days,” she said. “Wished me luck, and hired someone else for the job. Okay.”
But, Mediaite also points out that Warren has told different reasons as to why she quit teaching. In 2007, Warren told Harry Kreisler during an interview she left teaching because she lacked the qualifications. On a return trip to her home state of Oklahoma, her childhood friends convinced her to attend law school:
"I was married at nineteen and graduated from college after I’d married, and my first year post-graduation I worked in a public school system with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an “emergency certificate,” it was called. I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, “I don’t think this is going to work out for me.” I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years, and I was really casting about, thinking, “What am I going to do?” My husband’s view of it was, “Stay home. We have children, we’ll have more children, you’ll love this.” And I was very restless about it.
So, I went back home to Oklahoma — by this point we were living in New Jersey because of his job — I went back home to Oklahoma for Christmas and saw a bunch of the boys that I had been in high school debate with and they’d all gone on to law school, and they said, “You should go to law school. You’ll love it.” I said, “You really think so?” And they said, “Of all of us, you should have gone to law school. You’re the one who should’ve gone to law school.” So, I took the tests, applied to law school, and the day my daughter, who later became my co-author, turned two, I started law school at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey, which at the time had the nickname of being the “People’s Electric Law Company,” a really crazy place.
So, we now have two stories in as many days showing that Warren has not been very truthful about her career path. Something is very strange here. We'll see if she's pressed about it next week during CNN's Democratic Debate.*
*Who are we kidding, that won't happen