Green Mountain State socialist Senator Sanders is certainly feeling the Bern — of his own medicine. Sanders, who’s in the habit of calling President Trump a “racist” and a “sexist,” is now accused of “sexism” himself for allegedly telling Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that she couldn’t win the presidency because she’s female. Yet even if Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had made the comment, would it really reflect “sexism” — or something else?
CNN broke the story yesterday, writing about a meeting that took place between the two candidates at Warren’s apartment in Washington, D.C., one December 2018 evening.
“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,” CNN reports. “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,” the site continues.
Note that these testimonials would be known in a court of law as “hearsay” and in this case would be inadmissible, with four “witnesses” who witnessed nothing. That said, the court of public opinion has different rules, one being that assessments of guilt aren’t always made fairly, and assessments of charges aren’t any better. As to this, a point here has been missed:
Even if Sanders had uttered the alleged comment, it wouldn’t reflect “sexism.”
It would be an indictment of America.
Remember, a longstanding and standard liberal line was that a “woman can’t be elected president” (at least at the given point in time). In 2005, the Atlantic quoted a Democrat insider who said that the “country isn’t ready to elect a woman for President who doesn’t have (or isn’t perceived to have) executive abilities” (e.g., Warren).
In 2007, Pew Research Center tackled this question in an article titled “Are Americans Ready to Elect a Female President?” And the New York Times reported in 2000, “One in ten Americans thinks the United States will never elect a female president, and more women hold that view than men.” (Emphasis added.)
Were the greater number of women thus opining anti-female? They were exactly what Sanders was, assuming he made the alleged comment: cynical about their own nation. The idea, by leftist lights, is that many Americans are too “sexist,” misogynistic, and bigoted to elevate a woman to our land’s highest office.
For Sanders’ part, he has angrily denied the charges, calling them “ludicrous.” And he does look better in this he said-she said dust-up.
First, Warren is the girl who cried wolf. Her history of deceit includes using the pretense of being an American Indian to advance her career; plagiarizing recipes in a cookbook based on this façade entitled Pow Wow Chow (seriously?); falsely claiming she was fired from a teaching job for being pregnant; and justifying her school-choice opposition by telling a voter that her own kids attended government school when, in fact, her son went to a private institution.
Moreover, Sanders has a history of publicly stating that a woman could be elected president, as the below decades-old screenshot, courtesy of American Thinker, illustrates.
In reality, if Sanders is guilty as Warren charges, it reflects not sexism but stupidity. Evidence indicates that female candidates have an advantage in this politically correct time. Pew cited related findings in the aforementioned article, and the Washington Post penned a piece last year entitled, “The worst thing to be in many Democratic primaries? A white male candidate.”
No, this doesn’t directly speak to presidential general election fortunes. But with our time’s anti-male spirit, “male privilege” pablum, and impugning of “dead white males” (the Founders), the real question is whether an old wizened white guy with the looks of Methuselah can win the presidency.
Of course, none of this addresses the matter of whether an American Indian can be elected president. Perhaps Sanders can raise that issue with Warren at tonight’s Democrat debate.
Photo: AP Images
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
