If Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) is going to lose in November, it looks like he’s going to lose ugly.
Five staffers connected to Brown’s campaign have been caught on video mocking Elizabeth Warren by doing stereotypical Indian “war whoops” and “tomahawk chops” at a rally earlier this week.
According to Boston television station WCVP, the staffers in question are Brown’s Deputy Chief of Staff Greg Casey, Constituent Service Counsel Jack Richard, State Director Jerry McDermott, special assistant Jennifer Franks, and GOP operative Brad Garrett.
The offensive gestures were made in response to the controversy surrounding Warren’s Native American heritage. Brown spent much of the summer attacking Warren for listing herself as a minority in the Harvard Law School directory, accusing her of falsifying a Cherokee background to advance her career.
When asked about the video by WCVP, Brown said, “It is certainly something that I don’t condone.”
“The real offense is that [Warren] said she was white and then checked the box saying she is Native American,” Brown continued, “and then she changed her profile in the law directory once she made her tenure.”
Brown has recently picked up the frequency of his attacks on Warren’s heritage. During last week’s debate, Brown almost immediately went after Warren on the issue.
“Professor Warren claimed that she was a Native American, a person of color. And as you can see, she’s not. That being said, she checked the box. And she had an opportunity, actually, to make a decision throughout her career,” Brown said after being asked about Warren’s character. “When she applied to Penn and Harvard, she checked the box claiming she was a Native American. And, you know, clearly she’s not. That being said, I don’t know, and neither do the viewers know whether, in fact, she got ahead as a result of that checking of the box.”
In response, Warren released an ad criticizing Brown for the attack:
Brown’s renewed reliance on the Native American attacks are likely a sign of desperation, in response to a series of polls that show Warren surging into the lead in the Massachusetts Senate race. If that’s the case, Brown should know better. After all, his senior advisor Eric Fehrnstrom has seen firsthand in his work on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign that casual racism does little to help reverse sliding poll numbers.
