WHAT TO EXPECT DURING TONIGHT’S DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE. Jim Geraghty ponders when Joe Biden will fire the depth charge against Elizabeth Warren:

You don’t go after Warren on hypocrisy. Any rival who wants to nuke Warren’s campaign, particularly in a Democratic primary, should go right at her glaring weakness: “You’re not a woman of color, you were wrong to describe yourself as a woman of color, and when you claim you had no idea that Harvard Law School was touting you to the public as a woman of color, I don’t believe you.” The notion that Harvard was running around describing Warren this way and she simply never noticed it in any of their statements, press materials, or other documents is the most implausible aspect of Warren’s explanation. Even if you buy her story, it means she wasn’t following the debate about minority representation at the law school back in the 1990s, a pretty heated controversy at the time. No demographic likes a white person trying to benefit from fraudulent minority status. Warren will insist she never benefited from any affirmative action program, but many voters are unlikely to believe that claiming a minority status at an Ivy League law school faculty didn’t bring her any professional benefit at all.

My guess is that Bernie Sanders will never play that card, as he likes Warren too much that would be too personal an attack on a longtime ally. (Oh, and Sanders has his own racial controversy; in a 1997 book he used the n-word repeatedly in a critique of American racism. No one’s saying he’s used the term out of racial animosity, but there are people who will bristle at him using the term in any context.)

As Geraghty writes, “Biden won’t play that card against Warren until he needs it. But if you’re a Warren fan, you’ve got a difficult choice. Would you rather she face that storm in the Democratic primary, or in the general election against Trump?”