It’s common for liberals in the media to accuse Republicans of sexism, but now some in the press are leveling the same charge against Democrats who support Sen. Bernie Sanders for president.
In the last few weeks, liberal columnists and political commentators have directly accused Sanders’ supporters of sexism and of writing off his rival Hillary Clinton purely because she’s a woman.
Sanders and Clinton are often distinguished in terms of “authenticity,” a quality Sanders is widely believed to possess and one Clinton is lacking. But on Thursday, Washington Post blogger Catherine Rampell said even that perception is an example of a “sexist double standard.”
“It is precisely Sanders’s au-naturel-ness that endears him to his young fans: his unkempt hair, his ill-fitting suits, his unpolished Brooklyn accent, his propensity to yell and wave his hands maniacally,” she wrote. “This is, of course, a form of authenticity that is off-limits to any female politician, not just one with Clinton’s baggage. Female politicians — at least if they want to be taken seriously on a national stage — cannot be unkempt and unfiltered, hair mussed and voice raised. They have to be carefully coifed and scripted at all times…”
This week, liberal filmmaker Michael Moore endorsed Sanders, reasoning that Clinton is “to the right of [President] Obama and will move of backwards, not forward.”
Reacting to the endorsement, the Daily Beast’s political writer Michael Tomasky wrote Thursday “that having a woman president would be on its own terms a salutary thing.”
“To a lot of men, even men of the left, the woman-president thing just isn’t important,” Tomasky said.
Liberal writer Joan Walsh at left-leaning the Nation magazine went even further to paint Sanders’ entire base as sexist.
“Bernie is building a movement, we’re told (with little evidence of lasting organization, by the way), but it’s a movement whose loudest advocates are entitled young men who heap the vilest abuse on women who don’t deign to join it,” Walsh wrote in a column endorsing Clinton late January.
Clinton herself has at least once hit Sanders with the gender card. At one of the Democratic debates in the fall, Sanders said that “all the shouting in the world” would not impact gun violence in the United States. At a public event that followed, Clinton said, “Sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting.”
Sanders and Clinton are, for now, in a tense battle for the party nomination. Clinton won the Iowa caucuses this week by less than 1 point and Sanders is favored to win the first primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday.
