The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Sexism did it. A widespread sense of female inferiority pushed Elizabeth Warren from contention in the Democratic primary for president, some insist. I’d like to suggest a more powerful force was her chicanery, as in refusing on 17 public occasions to say whether she was going to hike taxes on the middle class.
The issue was the enormous cost of “Medicare for All” and how in the world it was going to be paid for without tax increases for all. She had wholeheartedly endorsed the program and she had a fixed reply when asked the question. Instead of saying yes or no, she would just say the middle class would save money because of reduced health costs. Was she dodging the issue for fear of losing points with voters, and was the duplicity detectable by the lowest intellect?
She was and it was, and the hidden truth had to be one of two things: First, that she and her staff had irresponsibly failed to figure out how the program would be financed or, second, that they had figured it out and the middle class would in fact be hit. Eventually, she had another answer, namely that the money would come from a wealth tax affecting only the super-rich impoverished in the votes they could cast. Of course, European countries have been abandoning wealth taxes because they don’t work, and then there was another problem.
The whole idea of Medicare for All began to lose popularity as people began to realize 150 million employer-sponsored plans would be extinguished. Look, said Warren, people’s right to select their own health coverage would last for at least a few years under her concoction.
Well, the issue no longer matters for her because voters on Super Tuesday said goodbye. She responded by saying women like her are called “whiners” when they mention sexism as the cause of such misfortune even if a “bazillion” of them know it’s at play. I’d like to acquaint her with less than a bazillion facts that still happen to matter.
There are far more women voters than male voters in the country, especially in the Democratic Party. A reported study of 45,000 elected officials in 2018 showed that women on the ballot were as prone to win elections as men. It was in that year, in fact, that a record number of women were elected to the House of Representatives. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got more popular votes than Donald Trump despite a basket of deplorables. At one point, polls showed Warren herself beating all her primary opponents, and many in the media loved her.
This was despite her having once identified herself as Native American and trying to prove her point with a TV ad showing she had just a tiny percentage of any such inheritance. As she lambasted CEOs and corporations, few critics mentioned her decades of work as a lawyer making hundreds of thousands of dollars representing corporations sometimes at odds with those on her victims list. This former Harvard law professor and her husband are worth millions, which is fine but maybe one reason she kept emphasizing less privileged days.
For instance, she said her father was a janitor when a brother said he wasn’t. She told us she was fired as a teacher because she was pregnant when school district documents disagree. A black woman took her to task for her opposition to charter schools and she said her children went to public schools even though one went to private schools. Charter schools are public schools, by the way, and the issue for the black woman was having a choice that Warren opposed even though she had it thanks to moolah in the pocketbook.
Issues do matter to voters, and Warren had a compilation of Sanders-style plans at Sanders-style costs and it added up to unending government control of our lives and the not-so-trivial possibility of economic chaos. The more thought that was put into it, the more moderation mattered, and Joe Biden was moderate enough to end up as just one of two Democratic candidates left standing. Bernie Sanders is also hanging in there with the socialist-minded who seem to have decided he had authenticity and Warren didn’t. Or was the problem sexism?
Morning Briefing Newsletter
Get a rundown of the latest local and regional news every Mon-Fri morning.
