National Review Online
Friday, March 06, 2020
Elizabeth Warren cannot believe that she was defeated by
the campaigns of Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders — she insists, instead, that she
was defeated by their testes.
We sympathize, truly. It is difficult to believe, and
must be tough to accept, that any barely competent political operation could be
defeated by the steadiness and freshness of Joe Biden or by the suavity and
wide-ranging appeal of Bernie Sanders. And Senator Warren likes to think of
herself as more than barely competent but omnicompetent, competence personified
— “competence incarnate,” as Megan Garber calls her in The Atlantic.
Those who have watched Senator Warren campaign (awkwardly) or try to
triangulate a health-care program (beseechingly) or explain away that weird
Cherokee-princess stuff (cringe-inducingly) might be forgiven for doubting this
particular incarnation.
Of course, the explanation must be sexism. It can’t be
Russian trolls on Facebook — this is the Democratic primary we are talking
about here! Senator Warren says it is sexism, her amen corner in the media says
it is sexism, all right-thinking people say it is sexism — and what this says
about Democratic-primary voters is of some interest.
If you cut the data just right, you can make a bit of a
case. A study of “hostile sexism” among Democratic-primary voters (“hostile
sexism” is denoted by affirming such statements as, “Most women interpret
innocent remarks or acts as being sexist,” a formulation in which there is just
a hint of Kafka) found that the Democrats with the highest “hostile sexism”
scores preferred two teste-bearing candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders,
while those with the lowest hostile-sexism scores ranked Warren and Biden about
even but took a low view of Sanders. (Pete Buttigieg didn’t break 10 percent among
the most hostile, the least hostile, or even the middle.) The Warren downslope
intersects the Sanders upslope right in the middle of the hostile-sexism chart,
but at no point in that chart does Warren actually lead Biden.
The feminists’ lamentation here is predictable: “Just
give us a woman! Just give a woman a chance.” And the problem for Warren is the
same problem that faced Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016: Americans are open to a
woman — but that does not mean they are open to this woman. Many Democrats
said that they worried about Warren not because she was a woman but because she
reminds them of a particular woman — the one who lost to Donald Trump in 2016,
an experience the Democrats are, understandably, not eager to repeat.
But a woman president? We think Americans would welcome
it. If it were possible to plant a batch of Margaret Thatcher seeds in Oklahoma
or Idaho, Republicans would be happy with that harvest of presidential
candidates. Nikki Haley often is spoken about as a potential Republican
nominee, and one need not deny the existence of sexism categorically (which
would be foolish) to believe that her biggest obstacles to the Republican
nomination or the presidency would have nothing to do with her sex. Democrats,
too, would surely be overjoyed to elect a woman president, provided . . . well,
there’s the hang-up.
Warren is a poor candidate, one who managed to combine
the worst ideological excesses and woke silliness of the Sanders tendency
(remember that weird stuff about recruiting a “young trans person” to screen
her Cabinet picks?) with the uninspiring lukewarmness of the so-called centrist
candidates. She comes off like a 1990s-vintage New Democrat who has attempted
to retrofit herself for the post-Occupy Democratic Party — which is what she is
— basically strapping on a pair of rhetorical Birkenstocks. It is said to be prima
facie evidence of sexism to suspect the ambition of a female candidate, but
the abjectness of Warren and the obviousness of her cynical careerism is there
in full view nonetheless, and her chromosomes present us with no reason to fail
to see it or to understand it for what it is. Some of the people who scoffed at
Mayor Pete for attempting to jump from the South Bend mayor’s office to the
White House might have had ugly attitudes about homosexuals, which is
lamentable — but Buttigieg’s candidacy was nonetheless preposterous.
Women have been doing very well in congressional races
for years — and in executive races, too, as the governors of Kansas, South
Dakota, Maine, New Mexico, Michigan, Iowa, Alabama, Oregon, etc., can attest.
It is worth keeping in mind that the data sets of American presidents (45) and
American presidential elections (58) both are pretty small. Barack Obama’s
electoral success did not tell us very much about racism in the United States —
only that being black is not an insurmountable obstacle. We should be careful,
and not strident, about casting aspersions on the American electorate, or even
on that daft and inexplicable subset of it that dominates the Democratic
primary.
There were plenty of excellent reasons for Elizabeth
Warren to lose the primary, though we confess we are hard-pressed to think of
any good reasons why Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders should win.
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