Democratic voters are not just racist but also sexist

Those poor Democratic primary voters. You think members of the press would have a higher opinion of them by now, considering these are the same voters who placed President Obama in the White House and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Guess not!

“America Punished Elizabeth Warren for Her Competence,” declared a headline published this week by the Atlantic.

The op-ed adds, “The country still doesn’t know what to make of a woman—in politics, and beyond—who refuses to qualify her success.”

“Elizabeth Warren Could Never Escape The Baggage Of Being A ‘Female Candidate,’” mourned HuffPost. “She was qualified. She persisted. But sexism still mattered.”

The requiem adds, “Warren couldn’t just run for president. At every step of the campaign, she was reminded that people still saw her as a female candidate, with all the baggage that comes with that designation ― questions about her toughness, likability and relatability.”

Elsewhere, at MSNBC, reporter Ali Vitali disagreed with HuffPost’s thesis, arguing instead that it was Warren herself who made her supposed “baggage” a chief selling point of her candidacy.

“This campaign was unabashedly feminist every single day that we were out here on the campaign trail,” said Vitali. “We obviously know now that we have two septuagenarian white men now left for Democratic voters to choose from.”

Said CBS News’ Caitlin Huey-Burns, “We cannot talk about Warren’s fall without talking about the sexism still so prevalent in American politics.”

Yes, we can!

CNN contributor Wajahat Ali added with his own special brand of commentary, “It’s a shame that this country hasn’t elected a woman president yet. The double standard and misogyny still runs deep.”

“One of Warren’s greatest obstacles: Democratic voters overlearning from 2016 that no woman could win, when there were so many other factors in Hillary’s defeat (Comey, trust issues, Russia) in addition to the sexism & misogyny. It’s yet another costly legacy of Hillary’s loss,” said Pro-Publica’s Alec MacGillis, rattling off a well-worn list of excuses for why the corporate swamp monster the Democrats nominated in 2016 lost to a former game show host.

It goes on like this for quite a while, so I will spare you the bulk of the complaints. Before we go, though, there is one particularly amusing complaint about the demise of the Warren 2020 campaign, and it comes from feminist commentator Jessica Valenti.

“It Will Be Hard to Get Over What Happened to Elizabeth Warren,” reads the headline to her post-mortem on the senator’s campaign. “I’ve had to come to terms with America’s sexism again and again.”

She adds, “[W]e had the candidate of a lifetime — someone with the energy, vision, and follow-through to lead the country out of our nightmarish era — and that the media and voters basically outright erased and ignored her.”

This is such a load of nonsense.

Warren got the most speaking time of any candidate in the July 30 debate, the October 15 debate, the January 14 debate, and the Feb. 19 debate. The senator also won endorsements from the New York Times, the Des Moines Register, and the Boston Globe ahead of key state primaries and caucuses.

When the news media were not explicitly endorsing Warren, they were implicitly endorsing her with praise and approving coverage. In terms of enjoying positive, friendly news coverage and commentary, no one had it better in the 2020 primary than Elizabeth Warren. Other than all of that, yeah, Valenti makes a great point about the media’s alleged erasure of the Massachusetts’s senator.

Could sexism have played a role in Warren’s failure? Maybe, to some degree. But to say it was the chief thing that destroyed her candidacy is not only lazy and cheap commentary but it is also an insult to all the Democratic primary voters who have shown already that they do not have that big of a hang-up handing a woman their party’s nomination.

Maybe – just maybe! – Warren was a bad candidate.