The top five Democratic presidential contenders are followed by failed senatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke, two sitting senators, a member of the House of Representatives, and then entrepreneur Andrew Yang and self-help author Marianne Williamson.
Considering that no one knows who Yang and Williamson are, that’s kind of amazing. More than 6 in 10 Americans have never heard of Williamson, and less than half the country has ever heard of Yang. In between Williamson and dead last in the RealClearPolitics average are eight candidates.
Then, there’s Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., polling at 0%.
It’s not a visibility problem. Seven in 10 Americans know who she is. They just don’t like her very much.
Gillibrand gave us a glimpse at what utter and complete failure looks like on Sunday night, when she melted down on national television during a Fox News town hall with Chris Wallace.
Gillibrand, a career politician who’s held more positions than there are grains of sand on the beach, has a constituency that attempts to find the overlap between aggrieved soccer moms who voted for Hillary Clinton but can’t get with Elizabeth Warren’s breathless cronyism, abortion absolutists who spar with intersectionalists on the basis that they sideline feminism, and #MeToo activists who are mostly in it for the political points.
All of this is to say that Gillibrand doesn’t really have a constituency. The results are fascinating, like a train wreck in slow motion that you don’t want to rubber neck at on the road, but can’t help but glare at.
A town hall attendee asked Gillibrand a question that every Democrat in the country ought to have a succinct answer to: whether she supports the legalization of third-trimester abortion, something just 13% of Americans back.
Step 1: Gillibrand pivots and attacks Fox News for covering Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s defense of depriving an infant born alive during an abortion life-saving care.
“What we have created, unfortunately, is a false choice and a false narrative,” Gillibrand said of the issue. “And Chris, I want to talk about the role that Fox News plays in this because it’s a problem. I can tell you before President Trump gave his State of the Union, Fox News talked about infanticide.”
Wallace then refuted Gillibrand, noting that Fox was giving Gillibrand more viewership than she’s probably received in the entirety of her presidential bid and that her ad hominems weren’t “very polite.”
Step 2: Gillibrand then attempted to actually answer the question by still not answering the question. Gillibrand basically said late-term abortion is just a woman’s decision because of Roe v. Wade, revealing once and for all that she knows nothing about Roe v. Wade. That Supreme Court decision didn’t issue a blank check for women to demand that doctors smash the skulls of their fully viable, sentient, third-trimester babies. It applied to first-trimester abortions only. Even Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which introduced the politically charged viability standard, doesn’t categorically protect third-trimester abortion. But the facts don’t matter when you understand step 3.
Step 3: Turn that not “very polite” line into a campaign slogan.
How hard is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand pushing her not “very polite” moment from her Fox News town hall? Her campaign just changed her Twitter bio to include it: pic.twitter.com/yeb2yko6D0
— Dan Merica (@merica) June 3, 2019
Kirsten Gillibrand will never be president. At least she’ll get a decent book deal out of it.
