New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman on Sunday said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) appeared "stilted" during her 2020 campaign rollout, adding that she displayed "awkwardness."
CNN senior political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson played a clip from Warren's Instagram page, posted earlier in the week, where the senator and presidential hopeful cracked open a beer and took a drink.
"Beer was said a lot of times in that clip. I don't drink beer, maybe that's how people talk about beer, announce they're going to get a beer before they get a beer. Maybe," Henderson said. "People thought it was a little odd and stilted and scripted and of course goes back to this idea of which politician would you want to get a beer with."
Haberman responded by making the contrast to President Donald Trump before the 2016 campaign, saying his supporters saw him as "authentic."
She said the rollout "has looked stilted and certainly the DNA issue ... did not feel like it was handled well."
Haberman compared Warren in 2016, when she was in attack mode against Trump, to Warren in her 2020 rollout, saying the senator had a series of scathing tweets and interviews that appealed to her supporters in 2016.
"I think that appealed to a lot of people, and there’s a bit of a chasm between that and then what we’ve seen here. A lot of this race for Democrats is going to be about not just who can take the fight to Trump but how you take the fight to Trump," she said. "I think that the sort of awkwardness of her rollout shows that the Democrats are still figuring that out."
Washington Free Beacon managing editor David Rutz traveled to Iowa this weekend where he attended multiple of Warren's campaign events. During Saturday's campaign stop in Sioux City, a woman asked Warren in a scolding tone, "Why did you undergo the DNA testing and give Donald Trump more fodder to be a bully?"
"I am not a person of color," Warren said. "I am not a citizen of a tribe. Tribal citizenship is very different from ancestry. Tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship and I respect that."