What’s changing in terms of our perception of female candidates is real, but the pace is glacial. rtraister writes
Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. Photo: Getty Images It’s the end of the first year in the history of the United States in which six women made serious runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, just three years after the defeat of the first female nominee. The arrival of multiple women to presidential contention should have been a convulsive shock to a political system.
It is now almost 2020, and here are our female candidates: the Meanie, the Lightweight, the Crazies, and the Angry, Dissembling Elitists. In fact, by many measures, what’s unfolded over the past six months has provided a reminder of exactly how uncool and unevolved we remain about the women who run for president. Most recently, the refresher came in the form of a Times–Siena Poll that found that 41 percent of respondents who supported Joe Biden but not Elizabeth Warren agreed with the statement that “most of the women who run for president ‘just aren’t that likable.
Of course there is strategic, and often overmanufactured, effort in these kinds of performatively snappy Twitter retorts. Politicians are just doing what most of us on social media all day are trying to do: make strangers laugh at our jokes and, in doing so, like us more. But there are important differences among the candidates in how they’re imagining they might be better liked.
And maybe it’s that reaction — of men who really, really don’t like to be laughed at, or criticized — that prepared the ground for what was going to be an inevitable attack on Warren, who speaks often of her fury at inequity and her commitment to fighting hard: that she was angry. In a bad way. In fact, after Harris memorably challenged Biden on his record on busing during a July debate — and crucially during her resulting surge, when she was perceived as a threat by her rivals and the political media — she was labeled by the conservative Washington Times “the Angry Black Presidential Candidate” in a column that suggested that Harris is “angry at everyone who doesn’t think like her .
It is extra rich that Biden would remark on Warren being somehow prone to unyielding fury given the tenor of their most recent debate exchange: While he furiously gestured at her, yelling that he’d been the one responsible for wrangling the votes she needed to build her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Warren somehow managed to simply stare ahead at the middle distance and smile.
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