My last post included this quotation on Elizabeth Warren’s attempt to distinguish herself from the last Democratic woman to seek the presidency: ‘Instead of the aloof insider-technocrat, she is promoting herself as a kind of “Mary Poppins” figure — the cheerful, exuberant, uber-competent woman who simply gets things done and makes everyone feel included and proud.’
It turns out that a couple of the men — Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg — seeking the Democratic nomination have discovered that Senator Warren, like Hillary Clinton before her, lacks the proper presidential demeanor:
Buttigieg laid the groundwork by criticizing Warren’s “my way or the highway approach” and suggesting recently that she is “so absorbed in the fighting that it is as though fighting were the purpose.” Biden, launching a range of new attacks on Warren, said this week that she reflects “an angry unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics.”
This tact is depressingly effective in contemporary politics:
“Labeling a woman angry, or emotional or shrill, is a well-worn strategy when it comes to attacking women’s qualification to serve an office,” said Amanda Hunter, a spokeswoman for the Barbara Lee Foundation, which conducts research on women seeking elected office.
Those attacks, she said, can be effective because they sow doubt in the person and make them less likable.
Anyone who has watched Warren on the campaign trail can see how ill-fitting this critique of her is: “Warren bounds onto the stage…. The affect is upbeat, barely contained energy.” But, in my view, Biden’s recurring promise to restore comity in Washington is even more off the mark.
“With Donald Trump out of the way, you’re going to see a number of my Republican colleagues have an epiphany. Mark my words. Mark my words.”
Barack Obama offered this exact critique circa 2012: “I believe that If we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”
Didn’t happen. And Biden should know better, since he experienced the absolute Republican intransigence from the beginning:
Vice President Biden told me that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any bipartisan cooperation on major votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators who said, ‘Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ ” he recalled. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was, ‘For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden said. The Vice President said he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along those lines.
The Veep has apparently forgotten what the country experienced during eight years of the Obama presidency. And if he wants to preserve his self-christened “middle class Joe” credentials — though that has become more of a stretch — he may wish to embrace a more unyielding approach.
It’s going to take a fight to undo decades that created the chasm between the middle class and the super rich. Republicans (who have fought tenaciously to create this dichotomy) won’t be helping just because likeable Joe Biden wins an election.
(Image: Senator Warren’s official portrait.)
