Hmmm:
The stakes were high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met at Warren’s apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in December 2018. The longtime friends knew that they could soon be running against each other for president.
The two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential candidates, they should remain civil and avoid attacking one another, so as not to hurt the progressive movement. They also discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters.
Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.
The description of that meeting is based on the accounts of four people: two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two people familiar with the meeting.
After publication of this story, Warren herself backed up this account of the meeting, saying in part in a statement Monday, “I thought a woman could win; he disagreed.”
Sanders has issued a full denial. Warren stands by her account. Both are kinda sort downplaying it and not downplaying it at the same time. As is usually the case with these kerfuffles, the battle is being waged on Twitter. The Bernie Bros are pointing out that Bernie has a 30-year track record of saying a woman could win an election. They are also noting Warren’s tendency to stretch the truth a bit. Warren Stans, by contrast are pointing to a pattern of behavior from the party and the media that seems to disfavor their candidate.
Ultimately, there is no way of knowing what was said. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle: Bernie, in the context of decrying the party’s drift toward identity politics, said something that Warren interpreted a bit differently than he intended it. All Married-Americans have had the experience of someone saying you said something that you don’t remember saying and would never say because really does that sound like me?
Ahem.
Ultimately, this will not matter. This is another Twitter spat that will not move a single vote, no matter what the truth behind it. What’s more interesting is what it reveals: a growing split between the Warren and Sanders camps. Camps that, until now, have peacefully coexisted. Warren has been fading at the polls and we’ve seen more and more complaints that this is because of media unfairness or sexism, which are not the kind of things you hear from a healthy campaign.
This doesn’t mean Warren can’t win. If she pulls out a victory in Iowa, that will right the ship quite a bit. But she is feeling her moment slipping away. And Bernie is feeling his moment coming. So as we move into the next to last of the 624 primary debates, this will be something to keep an eye on.
Warren has had a… problem… with truth this campaign season. Between her brother disputing her claims about their father’s profession (maintenance, not janitor), doubling down on her supposed native ancestry, using said ancestry to get into Havard while claiming to have never used it, and so on, I am not feeling that she is particularly truthful, but rather more truthy. She might not be lying per se, but she has a tendency to push facts into knots. Poorly, I might add.
But, I have no dog in this fight, as I am not voting D this election.Report
I am not sure what to make of this story except that it probably only helps Biden. It is unsurprising I suppose. Warren and Sanders have slightly different but overlapping bases that are solid but not quite growing.* They need to peel votes off from somewhere to get ahead. It does not quite help that Warren and Sanders voters both seem to put Biden as choice 2.
*My anecdotal and rough view is that Sanders voters are generally under-40, usually fairly well-educated but got royally fucked over by the recession and are underemployed or unemployed. Warren voters tend to be equally educated but survived the recession with some hits but not fatal blows. They also tend to be more in their 30s-50s. There are also some weird aesthetic issues because Warren styles herself as a reformist and capitalist (I believe her) and Sanders markets himself as a “democratic socialist.” I think both largely advocate for the same things but some people on the left are really rubbed the wrong way by how Warren speaks of her views as reform instead of burn it all down and start again. One reason I think Sanders supporters can’t stand Warren or Buttgigeg is because those candidates remind them of their more successful friends.Report
I see this as analogous to the way the American left hated FDR for being a reformer instead of a revolutionary.
There’s nothing revolutionaries hate more than the ones who suck the wind out of their sails.Report
Erstwhile sister Elizabeth Picciuto had this take:
Her pointing this out makes me realize that there are two ways to read Bernie saying that he didn’t believe a woman could become president.
The first is a snarling “WOMAN! YOU WILL NEVER BECOME PRESIDENT! I DESTROYED HITLERY AND WILL DESTROY YOU TOO!”
The second is that he was dropping lines like Tupac in “That’s Just The Way It Is” when he spat “We aint ready to see a black presidant, unh”. Was what Tupac said a racist thing? Would it be racist if someone else agreed with him? Would it have been racist if someone else, more in sadness than in anger, repeated his words?
So if he was doing the latter, to what extent ought we be upset with the Bernster?
That said, if he said the latter, to what extent is it bad if Warren leaked that he had said the former?
Because I think we can all agree that it would be significantly out of character for Bernie to have said the former (but it would not be out of character for him to have said the latter).
And now we’re dealing with whether it’d be out of character for Warren to sell what Bernie said as the former when, really, he said the latter.Report
In the context of a strategic meeting about defeating Trump it makes complete sense that Sanders might counter her claim to strength with women with the prospect that a female candidate may be disadvantaged with the electorate. Otherwise, there is also the issue nobody will want to talk about in the upcoming election: Memory slips in your 70s may be an early hint of future dementiaReport
While I can understand the initial appeal of that play, it’s a bit of a shotgun blast insofar as it hits a lot more candidates than we’d like it to.
But, heck, if it gives us Yang/Buttigeig, I would be willing to hold my nose and vote for them.Report
But Warren’s not selling that. Here’s the tweet that has driven everyone around the bend:
https://twitter.com/edokeefe/status/1216880585706217473
“I thought a woman could win; he disagreed.”
“[…] our differences on punditry.”
Warren is saying that Bernie said the latter. Period.Report
So Bernie made a trivial observation (that may have been right or wrong, we dunno yet) and it’s otherwise no big deal?
No harm no foul, I guess.Report
That’s my take.Report
For what it’s worth, I agree with it.
But there seem to be a large number of people who see the observation not as trivial but as something Trump would say.Report
Real people or twitter people?Report
An excellent question!
I’ll dodge it by saying “journalists”.
Edit:
Also: Television Personalities.
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I don’t think @MeghanMcCain is a real person. Not sure if she’s still a Twitter person, since she blocked me for saying that her husband’s wedding vows were probably plagiarized.Report
I found Whoopi’s comments more interesting.
Not that she’s real in any way that matters either.Report
I mean, she could have said [name of herself, or another woman candidate] could win, he disagreed and this is the second hand, 12 month old remembrance foisted upon us.
Truthy indeed.Report
Dear ol’ Uncle Bernie, dear ol’ Uncle Joe is lucky he’s around.Report
I don’t know how many “Oh, no! Bernie said something sexist! Better vote for Biden!” folks are out there.
I’m sure it’s non-zero (as “NOBODY IS SAYING X!” is always false anymore) but I’m not sure it’s significantly non-zero.Report
Oh I’m not talking about things Bernie does, just what Bernie is. He’s got a pretty hard ceiling for support and also a pretty high floor. He’s a stubborn ol’ coot and he’s likely to run his campaign out to the convention. If Bernie wasn’t around that sizable fragment of the left he’s tying up could be making a more feasible leftist a real contender. If us moderates have any strategic sense then we should say a quick prayer for Bernies health every night to those impersonal gods of electoral politics.Report
At this point, any of the top five candidates can win Iowa. I would not be surprised if it is Klobuchar winning but that would be the most surprising. The three candidates surprising me with a win would be Bloomberg, Steyer, and Yang. The real question is whether winning Iowa and New Hampshire could create momentum in other states. For this, I suspect, Warren, Klobuchar, Steyer, and Bloomberg get more from wins that any other candidate.
FWIW, I suspect but cannot prove that a heart attack would have forced Biden out of the primary campaign.Report
A Klobuchar win or at least a much stronger than expected performance is pretty much necessary to keep her campaign afloat and I say this regretfully as a supporter since she’s my #1 pick.
I actually think a Biden win would yield a LOT of oomph for him if he can pull it off. The rest of the states after NH and IA are kind of teed up for him; if Biden wins in Iowa then you could see some serious snowballing to him in later states where he’s stronger.Report
Make a case for her. What does Amy “we can never have nice things” offer anyone?Report
Uh-oh:
(Last year, we had a couple of threads about Warren releasing her DNA test. Might be worth boning up on the nothingburger before the debates. Then again, might not.)Report
In a normal world all of this should be damning but we do not live in a normal world: https://www.vox.com/2020/1/14/21066219/impeachment-lev-parnas-evidence-ambassadorReport
OK, I just wasted fifteen minutes of my life reading that drivel. Talk about a nothing burger, it’s all out of context messages, notes on paper that could have been written at any time, about any person, all bundled up with VOX(tm) explainerations.
Seriously, the piss hookers were more believable.Report
I should think a President conspiring with a foreign govt to oust his own ambassador and kill anti-corruption efforts in exchange for political dirt is a bit of a somethingburger.Report
I keep saying that fascism feels normal to that majority of the populace.
Even in the Soviet Bloc countries like Albania or Bulgaria, or those miserable 3rd World banana republics, most people just got up and went to work and watched tv like everything was normal.
People are like children in abusive homes, where they accept whatever reality they experience as normal.
We are seeing this play out in real time, where a plurality of American citizens shrug and accept stuff that is lifted right out of our grade school civics books of “what life is like in other countries”.Report
If anything in that mess of jackassery told that story, I would agree with you.
Alas.
Piss. Hookers.Report
Apparently Senor Bloombergs Twitter has gone loco:
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This might be the first time I’ve ever been tempted to get on twitter.Report
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Apparently, twitter has this thing going on now where people are sending snake emojis to Elizabeth Warren and her prominent defenders in an attempt, they say, to call her a “snake”.
One of the interpretations of this is that it is not only sexist due to the phallic nature of the snake, but because the snake is also a sexist symbol of the Jewish/Christian myth of how “the woman” supposedly brought sin into the world.
Apparently, Putin is behind it.Report
Russians, Russians everywhere.
But not a drop to drink.Report
It’s been a few days.
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