Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, really stepped in it while discussing why Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would have trouble in the Keystone state.
Rendell told Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel that Trump’s comments about women would hurt him in the general election, but then the former governor made his own inappropriate comment about women.
“Will he have some appeal to working-class Dems in Levittown or Bristol? Sure,” Rendell said. “For every one he’ll lose, one-and-a-half, two Republican women. Trump’s comments like, ‘You can’t be a 10 if you’re flat-chested,’ that’ll come back to haunt him. There are probably more ugly women in America than attractive women. People take that stuff personally.” (Emphasis added.)
Yes, Rendell, people do take that stuff personally. At least they do when a Republican says it.
Imagine the outrage if Donald Trump had just made the comment about “ugly women.” We don’t have to imagine, because everything Trump says about women has been jumped on by the media as proof of his misogyny. But when a Democrat says something like this? Radio silence.
I would give Rendell the benefit of the doubt that maybe he was trying to paraphrase another Trump comment about women, but I also trust Weigel to accurately characterize quotes. And while Trump has said terrible things about women, I can’t find anywhere where he suggested there are more ugly women in the country than attractive women.
But so it goes with Democrats. Rendell won’t be viewed as a misogynist for a comment like this, just as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders largely got a pass for his 1972 essay in which he wrote, “A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes about being raped by three men simultaneously.”
Sanders was allowed to dismiss the essay as fiction, along the lines of 50 Shades of Grey. No Republican would be allowed to brush off the quote and not get asked about it constantly throughout the campaign by the mainstream media.
If it does gain any traction, it will only be in other right-leaning media outlets. One could say that’s the case because Rendell isn’t currently a major figure in politics.
But let’s be real: Even if this were a former Republican governor who is barely in the spotlight, it would still be reported on by every liberal outlet in the country and used as yet more evidence that the Republican Party is misogynistic, even as these examples aren’t used as the same evidence for Democrats.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
