Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign launch on Thursday led to a wave of complaints from prominent female reporters who argued the press is letting O’Rourke get away with behavior it would never tolerate from a woman.
O’Rourke was already on thin ice with some women in January, when Nia-Malika Henderson wrote on CNN that his quixotic cross-country tour “drips with white male privilege.”
“This is Beto O’Rourke’s navel-gazing, self-involved, rollout of a possible rollout of a possible presidential campaign. Oprah Winfrey’s couch is next,” Henderson wrote. “This could never, ever be a woman.”
A day before O’Rourke launched his campaign, he was the subject of a glowing profile in Vanity Fair, which led to more complaints that he is getting press coverage women candidates can only dream about.
“The Vanity Fair profile of Beto O’Rourke is a classic example,” tweeted Amanda Marcotte, politics writer for Salon. “The writer drops references to Joseph Campbell, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc. The implication is clear: Beto is The Chosen One, here to save us from Trumpian doom.”
“No way would a woman get such a profile,” she added.
In a second tweet, Marcotte said male candidates are allowed to make a “moral case for themselves,” but when Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., does it, she gets “painted as a nag.”
O’Rourke’s quote in Vanity Fair that he was “born to be in” the 2020 race struck some reporters as a line no woman could ever deliver.
“I’m imagining Hillary Clinton giving the same quote and wondering about the reaction,” tweeted NBC’s Kasie Hunt.
I’m imagining Hillary Clinton giving the same quote and wondering about the reaction. https://t.co/KYvLJvBJt6
— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) March 13, 2019
After O’Rourke launched his campaign, he reportedly told someone that his wife is “raising, sometimes with my help,” their three kids. Some complained that O’Rourke is allowed to openly discharge the duty of raising his family to his wife, another luxury female candidates can’t afford.
Rebecca Traister, a writer for New York Magazine, argued that O’Rourke’s behavior would be “inconceivable” for women.
“[T]he idea that a woman could EVER, even in self-deprecating conscious acknowledgment, joke about how she’s ‘helping’ to raise her kids, is inconceivable,” she tweeted. “And that dynamic immediately narrows a field: what kinds of candidates can go on self-discovery tours and what kind can’t?”
[Opinion: Beto O’Rourke won’t win, but here’s how he could disrupt the 2020 Democratic race]
…the idea that a woman could EVER, even in self-deprecating conscious acknowledgment, joke about how she’s “helping” to raise her kids, is inconceivable. And that dynamic immediately narrows a field: what kinds of candidates can go on self-discovery tours and what kind can’t?
— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) March 14, 2019
“I do not love this,” tweeted Medium columnist and “feminist author” Jessica Valenti.
While these complaints tend to focus on how the press is receiving O’Rourke’s usual presidential campaign, there are already signs the complaints might soon become attached to the candidate himself.
Writing for Vox on Thursday, Laura McGann wrote that O’Rourke is “playing to liberal fears about running a woman against Trump.”
McGann wrote that as Democrats consider who they will nominate to face Trump in 2020, O’Rourke’s campaign “looks retrograde” compared to the campaigns of several women candidates who have excited the base. She also seemed to blame him in part for reaping the benefits of a press that she said boosts men and is less kind to women.
“It’s certainly not O’Rourke’s fault that these attitudes exist,” she wrote. “But it is his choice to play to them, rather than to challenge them.”
