Warren Confirms Sanders Told Her A Woman Could Not Win In 2020

[Anya Ristow]

It's good that you're not hopeful. Rather than really clarifying anything, the closing moments of the debate left us with a mushroom cloud cliffhanger.

Awesome

 

[Brenda Archer]

I don't think I wrote anything about you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In fact I described a TV thing assuming you hadn't seen it, since it appeared you hadn't.

Bad Bernie media coverage that nobody at VVO delighted in? I assumed it had gone unnoticed. What else was I to believe?

Actually it's been all over Left Twitter, I assume most of us have seen it there or on a newsfeed.

But it's true I don't watch TV for news, it's not a good use of my time. I also don't watch YouTube for news, as it has an algorithm that tends to push people toward rightwing and sensationalist material, and it's also not a good use of my time. It's an effort for me to follow voice conversation anyway.

Believe it or not, this doesn't mean I'm in a news blackout. It means I've curated my sources. It means I don't know what the latest flamewars on YouTube or Reddit are, and I don't care much, either.

And maybe instead of thinking we're deliberately ignoring the sources you think are important because it's about Bernie, maybe instead we're using other sources? Like, say in my case, New England newspapers and Bernie's mailing list? That I've been on since before he announced his first presidential run?

 

[Brenda Archer]

It's ongoing because he built that goodwill with policy years ago, not this year. His plans are more transformative and he hasn't hemmed and hawed about them.

He needs to build out more detail in his health care and disability related policies though, or he's gonna lose me and AZ early voting is coming up.

 

[Anya Ristow]

This is what throwing the game looks like. Expect to see an 8-hour looped version of this missed handshake on youtube today, and remember it as the moment both campaigns were flushed. Probably intentionally.



And there's this, at 1:19:

CNN: So, Senator Sanders, I do want to be clear, here. You're saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election.

Sanders: That is correct.

CNN: Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?

Get used to it, because you're going to be hearing it for four more years. President Trump.

FFS.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

There’s only one winner in the Sanders-Warren ‘fight’: Joe Biden | Arwa Mahdawi

In a perfect world, this would be a non-story. Both Warren and Sanders have progressive records that speak for themselves

www.theguardian.com

Her argument that this is a pointless fight that will benefit only Joe Biden seems reasonably persuasive to me, but I'm not close enough to US politics to know how accurate her analysis is.

This part of her argument, though, seems quite possible:

You know what we have here? A whole lot of hearsay that has been blown dangerously out of proportion. I have no idea what Sanders said in that 2018 meeting, but I do know that he’s not a misogynist. Forget anonymous sources, there’s plenty of clear evidence that he thinks a woman could be elected president. Indeed, there’s video footage of him saying just that in 1988. And then there’s the fact that he encouraged Warren to enter the 2016 presidential race. Not to mention his track record of supporting progressive young female politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. Calling Sanders, who is one of the very few high-profile politicians with a functioning moral compass, a misogynist is entirely nonsensical.

Does this mean I think Warren was lying about the conversation in order to get ahead in the polls, as some Sanders supporters have claimed? Absolutely not. I think that Sanders probably phrased his thoughts imperfectly and Warren understood him to be saying that a woman couldn’t beat Trump. Sometimes a misunderstanding is just a misunderstanding.

 

[Anya Ristow]

There’s only one winner in the Sanders-Warren ‘fight’: Joe Biden | Arwa Mahdawi

In a perfect world, this would be a non-story. Both Warren and Sanders have progressive records that speak for themselves

www.theguardian.com

Does this mean I think Warren was lying about the conversation in order to get ahead in the polls, as some Sanders supporters have claimed? Absolutely not. I think that Sanders probably phrased his thoughts imperfectly and Warren understood him to be saying that a woman couldn’t beat Trump. Sometimes a misunderstanding is just a misunderstanding.

Her argument that this is a pointless fight that will benefit only Joe Biden seems reasonably persuasive to me, but I'm not close enough to US politics to know how accurate her analysis is.

Her analysis is spot-on.

And that's why I assumed Warren would think clearly about the situation and issue some reassuring statement, like her twitter feed seemed to have done, but instead she refused to shake his had. She had an opportunity to fix this and seems to be choosing confrontation, instead. Boggles.

And given that they've gotten along so well in the year since that meeting and this is an issue just now, I think she's getting some bad strategy advice. Frankly, it looks like sabotage. This is the moment the media turned on her, probably coordinated with someone in the DNC or Clinton world. I predicted this would happen if Biden was still leading her when voting began.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Sanders' wife is from academia and it's pretty silly for anyone to say he's unaware of this demographic or unable to reach out to it. However, she's had some problems and the opposition will make hay out of that in the general.

If Sanders wins the nomination, Jane Sanders is going to be his Achilles heel. The Republican attacks on Sanders -- thru her -- are going to be brutal.

 

[Ishina]

Warren not clarifying what Sanders said looks dirty and dishonest to me.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Warren not clarifying what Sanders said looks dirty and dishonest to me.

To be fair, he hasn't clarified what he says she asked him, either, and I doubt either of them have a particularly precise memory of the conversation.

 

[Ishina]

To be fair, he hasn't clarified what he says she asked him, either, and I doubt either of them have a particularly precise memory of the conversation.

He claims he didn't say it. What further clarity is needed for that side of the story?

It's up to Warren to clarify what she means, since she's the one claiming Sanders said it, and since she's claiming something that can be read at least two ways, one of which is neutral, one of which is damning. By leaving the claim unclarified, and also standing upon it to make political noises about discrimination against women in politics, she is insinuating it should be read as the latter. I don't trust anyone who exploits a lack of clarity like that, especially when they have had multiple opportunities to clear it up one way or the other. It speaks to an attempt to avoid clarity and press its absence into the service of opportunism.

 

[Aeon Jiminy]

To be fair, he hasn't clarified what he says she asked him, either, and I doubt either of them have a particularly precise memory of the conversation.

In this case, I think it's up to Warren to be very clear and exact. This originates from her. She had to be the one who spread her viewpoint from the closed doors of two people. It comes from her team, her responsibility. She's running for President. She has initiated damage to an ally and has jeopardized the broader cause for that she claims to support. If she believes this is worth burning a treaty for, then she should clearly make her case. She's not in a race to elect a victim. She's in a race to elect a leader.

 

[Clara D.]

Unfortunately, younger age groups have traditionally not showed up to vote in the kind of numbers the older do.

Election day should be a national holiday.

 

[Eunoli]

Election day should be a national holiday.

Agreed, but so long as voter suppression is an actual tactic that Republicans openly use, that won't happen.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

He claims he didn't say it. What further clarity is needed for that side of the story?

It's up to Warren to clarify what she means, since she's the one claiming Sanders said it, and since she's claiming something that can be read at least two ways, one of which is neutral, one of which is damning. By leaving the claim unclarified, and also standing upon it to make political noises about discrimination against women in politics, she is insinuating it should be read as the latter. I don't trust anyone who exploits a lack of clarity like that, especially when they have had multiple opportunities to clear it up one way or the other. It speaks to an attempt to avoid clarity and press its absence into the service of opportunism.

We don't know the context at all.

That is, we don't know whether she asked him, completely out of the blue, if he thought a woman could win in 2020, or if the question arose as part of a longer discussion (and, if it did, what preceded and followed the exchange in question).

Nor do we know precisely what his answer was; I would have thought that the natural way to answer the question would have been, "Of course I do -- after all Hillary won the popular vote in 2016 -- but because he's a racist, sexist and a liar, he'll doubtless attack her for being a woman, so she'll have to be prepared to deal with that" (i.e. what he says he said but with the two points in reverse order to the way he summarises it.

Nor, as I said, do we know what followed -- how she reacted (if at all) to being told, as she says she was, that he didn't think a woman could win, or how the conversation progressed from that point.

All we do know is that she seems to have come away with the impression he'd said one thing, and he came away with the impression he'd said something different.

To my mind, it sounds like a simple misunderstanding, though I have to wonder why it didn't surface until now. If she'd wanted to attack him for something, I'm sure she could have found a better line of attack than a two-year-old conversation that neither of them is going to remember too well at this point.

 

[Shiloh Lyric]

You know what I really think about all of this? That, apparently, some of Trump's "goons" (because, yes, I consider Robert Hyde a 'goon' now) were watching an American ambassador, possibly with nefarious intent, and we REALLY need to get that asshole, Trump, out of office, and can't trust the Republican majority Senate to do their job.

THAT'S what I think about it. The rest is fucking noise.

 

[Anya Ristow]

If Sanders wins the nomination, Jane Sanders is going to be his Achilles heel. The Republican attacks on Sanders -- thru her -- are going to be brutal.

Trump criticizing Jane Sanders isn't going to be taken seriously by anyone who would vote for Sanders, so it will be Trump's surrogates that do it, so he isn't associated with it. This exact thing happened in 2016. Clinton's surrogates attacked Jane Sanders. It was argued on SLU.

That is...been there, done that.

It's even less a threat this time around since Trump surrogates don't exactly have access to potential Sanders voters the way Clinton surrogates did.

 

[Eunoli]

You know what I really think about all of this? That, apparently, some of Trump's "goons" (because, yes, I consider Robert Hyde a 'goon' now) were watching an American ambassador, possibly with nefarious intent, and we REALLY need to get that asshole, Trump, out of office, and can't trust the Republican majority Senate to do their job.

THAT'S what I think about it. The rest is fucking noise.

And yet, the dems seem likely to be far more focused on minutia. To me, and I think to almost any thinking person, the fact that the President of the United States sent goons to a foreign country to follow, spy on and perhaps arrange a hit on a United States Ambassador (at the least, we have it on the record that Trump had said she was going to "go through some things") should be all we're looking at today. We have written proof of all of this, plus the possible testimony of one of them. And what are dems all over the country more concentrated on today?

He said/she said. Over something that isn't all that important. This is how we lose.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Ishina]

To my mind, it sounds like a simple misunderstanding, though I have to wonder why it didn't surface until now. If she'd wanted to attack him for something, I'm sure she could have found a better line of attack than a two-year-old conversation that neither of them is going to remember too well at this point.

I don't think she could find a better line of attack, though. What would she attack? Not his policies, since they are mostly in line with her's and very popular among the voters she's courting. She'd have to attack his policies from the right, which would be self-imolation. Not his record, which is solid and consistent. How can she attack him from the left? Implying he's a sexist seems like it has a lot of political mileage.

Look at that tweet linked in the post above your comment. It seems that her insinuations are bearing fruit already. With one veiled innuendo, Sanders is associated with sexual harrassment and abusive employers in the mind of thousands of people. It's a very of-the-times line of attack, and there are a lot of well-intentioned liberals wary of doubting a Me Too moment. Their good souls are ripe for harvesting.