Mitt Romney made light of his father’s Mexican roots in a secretly recorded video in Florida, joking that if he were Latino, his path to 270 electoral votes would be a lot easier. But it turns out that the Mexican joke was just a lead-in to a riff about Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, the former Obama adviser and Harvard Law School professor who’s taking on Sen. Scott Brown this fall. Warren, you may recall, found herself in a bit of trouble this spring when the Boston Herald reported that she had identified herself to her Harvard employers as Native American. Romney, speaking in May as the story was unraveling, had some fun at her expense:
ROMNEY: My dad you probably know was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company, but he was born in Mexico. And had he been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this, but he was unfortunately born to Americans living in Mexico and he lived there for a number of years. I mean I say that jokingly, but it’d be helpful to be a Latino.
DONOR: Pull an Elizabeth Warren!
ROMNEY: That’s right I could go out and say—for those who don’t know Elizabeth Warren, she is the woman who’s running for US Senate in Massachusetts who says that she is Cherokee, has put her application over the years that she is Cherokee, and Harvard put down that she’s one of their minority faculty members. It turns out that at most that she’s 1/32 Cherokee and even that can’t be proven. So in any event, I can put down my dad was born in Mexico and leave it at that.
Watch:
Warren and Brown will have their first debate on Thursday.