The View hosts lamented how gender came “into play” leading to the demise of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“I think there’s this feeling, though, that — I believe she’s a much better candidate than Bernie. I think she was smarter, more likable,” co-host Meghan McCain said Friday about Warren. “Gender really did come into play. And I’m not the first person to always say this, but the way they’re covered by the media — it’s the way they look. They’re too likable. They’re not likable enough. They’re too shrill. She’s not smart enough. She’s not warm enough. … I think there’s a feeling of exhaustion among a lot of American women.”
“When are we going to start treating them like men?” she added. “I’m disappointed that they don’t.”
Joy Behar, another co-host on the show, pinned Warren’s downfall on “the patriarchy.”
“A man can be angry. A woman cannot be. Bernie is always angry,” she said. “I like him very much. He’s a good guy. But he always comes across as angry. Elizabeth Warren can’t come across that way. So they have similar agendas, the two of them, too, and still, we accept it in him but not in her. … In a normal year, without the horror show that’s going on in the White House right now, I think that a woman could have had a better chance. But we are in an emergency situation.”
Behar added that “the misogynists” are ruining the chances of a woman winning. “I don’t think it will next time. People are getting smarter,” she added.
Warren announced the end of her presidential campaign on Thursday. Speaking to reporters afterward, she dodged what she called a “trap question” about whether sexism was to blame.
“If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner,” Warren said. “And if you say, ‘No, there was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?'”
[Also read: Pelosi: A woman can win White House despite ‘a certain element of misogyny’]
