She still doesn’t get it: Faking minority heritage to get herself a job at Harvard is a stain that will not wash off for anyone pretending to be the savior of the oppressed. All of the posing as a victim championing other victims won’t work. The fact that her latest grovel comes at the end of a long, tortuous process by which she grudgingly – and only very gradually – admitted that she had pulled off a lie (though she still denies that it benefitted her career immensely) makes it pathetic, not convincing. She is a dead candidate walking, though she still doesn’t realize it. Speaking with a very friendly David Axelrod, interviewing her for his CNN TV show, The Axe Files, she put on her sad face and admitted “I shouldn’t have done it.”

She’s really sorry… that she got caught (YouTube screen grab)

I can’t think of another candidate in recent times who has handled criticism worse than Elizabeth Warren’s handling of her “cultural appropriation” of minority status as a Native American. First, she flatly denied that there was a problem because unprovable “family stories” said she was part Cherokee.  Then, she made up an improbable tale of her parents having to elope because of her grandparents’ racism directed at her purportedly Native American father.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren sought Sunday to bolster her shaky claims of Cherokee ancestry with the story of how her racist grandparents drove her parents to elope.

But Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes says that account has its own credibility issues.

Ms. Barnes, who said her research into Ms. Warren’s family found “no evidence” of Native American ancestry, has challenged key elements of the senator’s tale of how her parents, Pauline Reed and Donald Herring, defied his parents by running off to marry.

“The problem with Warren’s story is that none of the evidence supports it,” said Ms. Barnes in a 2016 post on her Thoughts from Polly’s Granddaughter blog. “Her genealogy shows no indication of Cherokee ancestry. Her parents’ wedding doesn’t resemble an elopement. And additional evidence doesn’t show any indication of her Herring grandparents being Indian haters.”

Then, after refusing a genealogy test, she took one and proudly declared the findings – that she may have 1/1024 Indian (or South American) heritage proved the truth of her claim, apparently unaware that the average resident of America has slightly more Native American blood.

That seems to have pushed her into recognition that the only way out was to apologize. Now, she is stuck, because she still can’t admit her craven motives without dooming her run for president. She still hasn’t admitted them to herself, yet.

But without that honesty, no apology will work. The idea that Harvard would have hired her without her race fraud, when it trumpeted her as the “first tenured woman of color” at the Law School and has no other graduates of non-elite colleges and law schools like hers among its tenured faculty, doesn’t pass the giggle test.

So, Warren is stuck defending herself with arguments that still cause her opponents to laugh at her.