Is Elizabeth Warren positioning herself for the veep slot on a Hillary Clinton ticket in 2016? It sure looks that way. The Democrats have discovered that “historic first” candidacies do wonders for turnout, and an all-female ticket would double the appeal to women.

Then there is the possibility that if Hillary decides not to run, Warren may seek a shot at the nomination herself. That’s the logical conclusion to draw from a burst of publicity this week, as pre-publication copies of her new book sent to friendly media are being previewed.

MJ Lee of Politico presents the Warren story as the senator would have voters see it, Of particular interest is the whining Warren does over the public questioning of her claims to Native American heritage that appear to have elevated her to a coveted tenured professorship at Harvard Law School, despite her conspicuous lack of the sort of academic pedigree and serious scholarship normally required for such a plum sinecure.  Warren goes into full war-on-women mode, shocked that anyone would criticize a candidate running for office:

“What really threw me, though, were the constant attacks from the other side,” she writes about the 2012 Senate campaign. “I would almost persuade myself that I was starting to get the hang of full-throttle campaigning and then — bam! Out of left field, the state Republican Party, or the Brown campaign, or some blogger, would launch a rocket at me.”

Perhaps the most hurtful and high-profile attack thrown against Warren by Brown had to do with her heritage.

At the height of the 2012 campaign, it was reported that Warren had listed herself as having Native American roots at Harvard University. Soon, there was a “full-blown campaign frenzy,” Warren recalls, with Republicans demanding that she prove her Native-American roots and accusing her of getting her job at the elite university by making false claims about her personal background.

Caught off-guard, Warren admits that she “fumbled” when reporters first asked her about the controversy.

Things only got worse when the Brown campaign asked whether her parents had lied to their children about her family. “He attacked my dead parents,” Warren writes. “I was hurt, and I was angry.”

Brown’s allegation that Warren had used her background to get ahead “simply wasn’t true,” she writes. “I was stunned by the attacks.”

Warren devotes a section of her book — called “Native American” — to this controversy, explaining that she had simply grown up learning about her Native American background from her family and that as a kid, she had never questioned her family’s stories or asked for documentation.

“Everyone on our mother’s side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry,” she wrote. “My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.”

As most AT readers know, Warren has never produced any documentary proof of her claim, a status that is highly advantageous to any academic job-seeker.

Simultaneously, Warren is being touted by Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO. Peter Sullivan of The Hill:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said Tuesday that “it don’t get no better” than Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) when it comes to possible holders of the Oval Office.

“In my opinion she is the prototype of a person we would want to be president of the United States,” Trumka wrote of Warren in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session Tuesday. “She has a very well defined set of values and unlike many politicians, she actually sticks by those values and fights to implement them. In short, it don't get no better.”

Don’t you love the affectation of bad grammar in endorsing an Ivy League professor? The haughty Warren is “one of us” to the union goons.

If Warren is maneuvering for a place on the ticket, she would make Barack Obama look like a paragon of political experience. While both were freshman senators, at least Obama had a few years as a back bencher in the Illinois State Legislature, Warren’s first race was her narrow Senate win in Massachusetts.