Sanders’ dispute with Warren had erupted the day before, with a news report of the 2018 meeting between them at which, according to CNN, Sanders told Warren a woman cannot win a presidential election. Warren confirmed the story. Sanders’ aides then called CNN’s (and Warren’s) account “a lie.”
A lie. Pretty strenuous protesting-too-much denial of something that could have been handily mitigated. If Sanders had more composure , he might have confirmed the report too — don’t we all think he said something close to what was reported? Then Sanders could have explained that he, like many feminists, fears America is too sexist to elect a Madame President. Done.
Instead his campaign distilled to a poisonous brew all the current male anxieties about gender with that one word: “Lie.” (On Twitter, pro-Sanders botnets drove the point home with a classy “Lying Liz” hashtag.) In Iowa, Sanders bloviated when the inevitable question about the report surfaced: “Anybody knows me knows that it’s incomprehensible that I would think that a woman cannot be president of the United States.” Inconceivable!
Then: “How could anybody in a million years not believe that a woman could become president of the United States?” In a million years!
Sanders’ move to the general case did his alibi no favors — and the moderators from CNN, which co-hosted the Tuesday debate, clearly didn’t buy his rejection of the reporting.
At the same time, who cares what Sanders said in a casual meeting? If Warren had told Sanders a Jewish man pushing 80 can’t win because the country’s too anti-Semitic and ageist, she’d have had nothing to be ashamed of.
But for Sanders and many politicians like him, this is the gender issue in 2020. It’s not a celebration of the Equal Rights Amendment which, astonishingly and way past deadline, the Commonwealth of Virginia ratified Wednesday. Instead it’s pizza rats and terror.
When the Sanders campaign said Warren lied, and Sanders himself insisted outrageously on his feminist bona fides (in a million years), and then tried to buttonhole Warren into a handshake only to storm off when he couldn’t seal the deal — all that only enacted the sexism he was at pains to deny.
