Cherokees, lies and cold crab omelets

Will a crab omelet recipe decide the fate of the nation?

It may come down to that as Democrats and Republicans fight for control of the U.S. Senate in 2012.

It's a nip-and-tuck battle with several closely contested races, most featuring candidates straight out of central casting, running careful, highly scripted campaigns.

In Nevada, for example, Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley of Las Vegas takes on Republican Sen. Dean Heller, the former Reno-area congressman appointed to finish the term of John Ensign, who resigned amid a sex scandal and cover-up. Berkley runs with a gadfly-like demeanor, and Heller campaigns with a permanent grin. Beyond those irritating optics, it's a wonkish campaign featuring off-the-shelf political rhetoric.

In Massachusetts, meanwhile, it's an all-too-human tale of how a little lie may consume a promising campaign.

This is the legacy seat of liberal icon Teddy Kennedy. It is considered the rightful property of Democrats.

But two years ago, Republican Scott Brown crashed the party and beat Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, a Democrat who, among many deficiencies, had trouble getting straight her Boston Red Sox players - a mortal sin in any baseball town.

Now comes Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor, hoping to restore order for Democrats. She's charming, articulate and stands tall for liberal ideals, making progressive hearts in that state beat like the wings of a hummingbird.

Oh, and by the way, she's also Cherokee. Maybe.

Turns out that Warren has long claimed to be 1/32nd Cherokee on the strength of a vague family story. It also turns out that she has used that story to consistently claim minority status at her places of work, raising questions about whether she inappropriately used her dubious claim to further her career.

Warren says she got her jobs on her own and that her "Cherokee" heritage was absolutely not a factor in her success. The validity of that claim dissipates, however, when the organizations she worked for (including Harvard) touted her as a minority hire.

It's all an embarrassing mess caught in the liberal grill of affirmative action gone wrong. Warren would like to forget about it. But, alas, for her those little lies retold on the national stage only get bigger.

Warren first said she listed herself as a Cherokee because she wanted to meet other Cherokees and get to know them. Her weird one-woman Cherokee outreach served only to red flag her story.

To tamp down growing questions, the Warren campaign then pointed to a book called "Pow Wow Chow" written by her cousin, Candy Rowsey. It was supposed to establish Warren's Cherokeeness because it featured five of her recipes. If she's not Cherokee, her surrogates said, what are her recipes doing in a Cherokee cookbook?

Brilliant. Did they think no one would check? At least two (and maybe three) of the five Warren recipes appear to have been flat-out plagiarized from Pierre Franey, the chef at Le Pavillon restaurant in Manhattan. The New York Times News Service published Franey's "Cold Omelets with Crab Meat" and "Crab with Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing" in 1979. Warren's recipes are virtually the same, word for word. So, either Warren's recipes were lifted from Chef Franey, or he stole them from some old Cherokee woman somewhere and served them up as his own at Le Pavillon.

You tell me? Which sounds more likely?

So now the Warren campaign sits with crab with tomato mayonnaise dressing on its face. Even a miracle on the scale of the Smithsonian finding a picture of Warren's great-great-grandmother serving her famed cold crab omelet to a Cherokee chief would come a little too late to erase the mockery.

Sherman Frederick, former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a member of the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame, writes a column for Stephens Media. Read his blog at www.lvrj.com/blogs/sherm.