Elizabeth Warren : the Resurrected Dream of a Female President
BY MICHELLE RUIZ, January 15, 2020
I didn’t know how badly I yearned for a female president until my first glimpse of what it would really look like. Hillary Clinton, suited in white, on stage at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July 2016. A moment pumped full of circumstance and potential power: a sea of American flags waving as she officially accepted the nomination, a convention center of thousands, and a home audience of millions looking to this person; to this woman.
Tears reflexively—and unexpectedly—filled my eyes. I wished my then two-year-old daughter was awake and both of my grandmothers were alive. Texts lit up from my mom and my friends. None of us had ever seen such a thing in our lives. I was pregnant with a son then, but, quite honestly, I held the dream of a female president for my daughter most of all. I knew my son would always see himself in the halls of power. I wanted her future to catch up to his.
More than three years later, it feels cheesy and over-sentimental to talk about that night amid the hardened cynicism of the Trump era. And yet, the country is still debating a woman’s capacity to win the presidency, or at least the Electoral College (as Clinton did, lest we forget, win 3 million more votes than the man). The conversation swirls anew courtesy of a CNN report about a 2018 conversation between senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in which she claims he said he didn’t believe a woman could win the 2020 race. Sanders and his campaign vociferously deny the report while Warren confirms it. “I thought a woman could win; he disagreed,” she said in a statement.
The he-said-she-said continued at the seventh Democratic debate on Tuesday, when close-watchers noted Warren appeared to decline to shake Sanders’s hand at the end of the night, and the two engaged in what looked like a bit of—spirited? Possibly tense?—conversation. After much hand-gesturing from both candidates, Sanders seemed to turn his back and walk away while Tom Steyer awkwardly looked on. (“I didn’t really hear anything,” Steyer told CNN on Wednesday. “I just said my goodnights as fast as I could.”)
The moment likely titillated body language experts and definitely thrilled cable news producers, but it was not the moment that defined the night. That honor went to Warren answering the lingering question—“Can women win?”—with trademark professorial logic. “Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections,” Warren said. “The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women. Amy [Klobuchar] and me.”
"Can a woman beat Donald Trump? Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women.” -Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
https://
cnn.it/2Rgpr10
The moment went viral; it was celebrated and retweeted and made into inspirational-quote form and shared on Instagram. #PresidentElizabethWarren began trending on Twitter. And I felt it again: the familiar, though partially buried, tingle of hope; the dream of a female president, even if, in the 2020 dogfight, it no longer seems top of mind. It’s come to feel picky and petty to hope for a woman winner—even contrived, like corporate “Who run the world?” T-shirt feminism.
The conflict between Warren and Sanders, two ideologically aligned progressives, is a source of anger and worry for Democrats: intra-party fighting does not serve the collective goal to defeat Trump and, yes, it’s all trivial compared to the very real and pressing struggles of health care, immigration, women’s reproductive rights, and climate change. The priority now, it seems, is to rally behind the most likely Electoral College victor, not split hairs about hypothetical female presidents.
When we’re talking about electability, though, the assumption is that a woman could not possibly be the one to win. “The whole conversation around electability is skewed. It favors men—and it favors older, white, straight men, because white men run for office more than anyone else, so they hold more offices than anyone else,” Caitlin Moscatello, author of the book See Jane Win, about female triumphs in the 2018 midterm elections, told Vogue this summer. “What we should be doing is looking at, in our current climate, who is winning. Who energized people? How? People aren’t racing to the polls to vote for the moderate, old, white male.”
I want a Democrat to beat Trump and end the national nightmare he hath wrought. But I can’t deny that my simmering, almost elemental desire for a female president is not only still alive, but feels even stronger and more urgent in the face of the current misogynist in chief. One can want to win, and also want the winner to be a woman.
If Sanders’s alleged comments strike a nerve, it’s only because the depressing sentiment is rooted in the truth. After all, no woman has won the presidency. It’s a fact that recently stunned my daughter, now almost six, as we read a children’s book called This Little President. It features George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama, and ends with a grid of 45 cute, cartoony illustrations of all of the American presidents. “No girls?” my daughter asked, genuinely astounded. “Ya gotta be kidding me.” To her pure, child’s mind, it made no sense. It should be equally outrageous to the rest of the country as it is to her. “No girls,” I sighed, unable to offer white lies or spin. “Not yet.”