With Warren Out, Seeking Shelter on This Thin Raft

I think I know why I'm having a problem blogging lately.

It's that, more and more, I am not writing anything remotely close to good news to share with the rest of you. The same overwhelming nightmare of crazy trumpian disasters day after day, combined with a paltry and thinned-out sense of relief we need to find at the end of all this madness.

The craziness of the Coronavirus pandemic notwithstanding, the thing that's been troubling me since last week - something it's taken me this long to write about - has been Elizabeth Warren's ending of her Presidential campaign.

It's heartbreaking for me. Above all, she was the only major candidate I viewed as an Active-Positive character with Adaptive and Gameplanning (all those plans!) skills. She showed better organizational skills than Bernie or Biden or Harris - Warren's campaign had events in Florida months ago, something I still haven't seen out of the remaining two big names - and she was giving inspirational speeches and appearances wherever she went.

As the candidates thinned out across a large - was it like 22 or 24 people running at one point? - stage, Warren remained one of the few who represented a shrinking diversity for the Dem party to support. We went from a number of Black candidates (Harris, Booker, even Deval Patrick) and Hispanic (Castro) and Women (Harris again, Klobuchar, Williamson (yeah I know), Gabbard (sigh), Gillibrand (yes for like one week), and Warren) among the White Men (Biden, Bernie, Beto, Inslee, Bennet, Hickenlooper, Bullock) and even a Gay White Man (Buttigieg) as the most diverse field ever to... well, almost no minorities and two (okay if you include Gabbard which you shouldn't, three) women candidate alongside the White Guys Biden Bernie and Buttigieg. Still...

The Democratic field even included the one ethnic group Democratic voting base doesn't like: Rich White Guys with Steyer and Bloomberg. Granted, Steyer is reasonably okay (he actually donates to charities!) and Bloomberg *is* still willing to put his money where it matters (helping the down-ballot races), neither of them were going to win over a party base that wants those billionaires to STFU and pay their damn fair share of taxes.

When Bloomberg finally made a debate appearance just before the Super Tuesday vote he had put all his hopes into, Warren was the one who gutted him onstage and finished him off Mortal Kombat style with a Flawless victory. It should have made her more popular with the Democratic voters, it should have translated into more support...

And yet when the actual primary voting happened, Warren could barely get enough voters from enough Democratic voters to qualify for delegates. Super Tuesday alone she couldn't even get past third place in her own state of Massachusetts (given how I ragged on Rubio in 2016 for being perpetually in third place, this was a painful karmic blow).

Unable to gain enough traction to play dealmaker at all for the Dem convention, Warren had no choice but to drop out. And it was just... hard to accept.

And it's not just me. My circle of friends - the socio-political bubble I admit I live within - both online and at work were mostly Warren fans, and they were broken up by it as well (is it telling that nearly every librarian I knew was cheering Liz forward?).

One of those in the circle was Emily L Hauser, who's been a published writer/pundit here and there over the years. She'd been the biggest fan for Warren since the start of her campaign, practically lived for every daily tweet and motivational message. The day that Warren announced the end of her campaign, Emily wrote this op-ed for the Chicago Tribune. It's a must-read, people, please check it out.

When Elizabeth Warren announced her 2020 candidacy, I was immediately all in, because she was the single most extraordinary candidate I’d ever seen. I’ve been a Democrat and activist my whole life, volunteering, protesting and organizing since high school, around myriad issues and across countless election cycles. I had been deeply moved by the opportunity to vote for Clinton.

I can’t say, however, that I found Clinton particularly inspiring. Warren, on the other hand, brought to American politics both a depth of knowledge and what race studies and constitutional law authority Kimberlé Crenshaw has termed “intersectionality” unlike anyone I’ve ever seen. Able to identify and articulate the ways in which, for instance, racism informs maternal mortality rates and sexism informs student debt, Warren understood that the problems facing our republic didn’t begin with Trump, and the aftermath of his presidency will require careful policies that grapple with all of it, all at once. She had a plan...

But Warren’s campaign — for which I have canvassed across state lines, made calls, live-tweeted speeches and raised more than $10,000 — faltered and finally ended Thursday. Despite her wisdom, compassion and proven success in establishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, unseating an incumbent Republican in Massachusetts and destroying the campaign of a billionaire with a history of sexual harassment complaints (bye, Mike Bloomberg) — Democrats, the ostensible party of progressive values, have decided they prefer one of two near-80-year-old men: Joe Biden, who oversaw the shameful railroading of Anita Hill in the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings, or Bernie Sanders, a man who was unaware that his 2016 campaign had been roiled with complaints of sexual harassment and gender pay disparities and when later asked about it by Anderson Cooper, responded that he hadn’t known at the time because he was “a little bit busy running around the country...”

But as we attempt to salvage our republic from the destruction wrought by a president actively seeking to unspool our democracy and placed in office by an electorate that didn’t care that so many women have reported suffering at his hands, I am consumed with grief and anger that my party rejected a woman of such unassailable caliber as Elizabeth Warren...

I'm with Emily on this. Warren was a great choice. She was intelligent, articulate, motivational, charismatic, humorous, focused, dedicated. The worst scandal on her was that she mislabeled her ethnicity as Native American in her college days, and she'd already explained that and apologized for it (of course, Republicans and trump especially still take to calling her "Pocahontas" as an insult). She took every policy issue seriously, she took every greeting and selfie line with grace, she did everything you'd expect from the candidate that ought to win the damn nomination.

And yet it was still not good enough. As hard as she worked at appealing to the Democratic voters, she still had to work past the problem of "she."

There is a stark realization as the Democratic nominating process narrows down to two main choices of Biden (Old White Male moderate) and Bernie (Old White Male socialist) that no matter what the Dems are bound to put an Old White Male at the top of the ticket. Having broken the barrier of African-Americans reaching the White House with Obama, the Dems are now terrified of "diversity" against arguably the worst Old White Male of all time in donald trump. As though the Dems are convincing themselves that Old White Men are the only offerings to win over enough American voters to win in November.

Never mind the reality that a woman Hillary Clinton WON the Popular Vote in 2016. Never mind the reality that Democrats are going to need voter turnout among minorities AND women to exceed last cycle's numbers.

I'm a guy, White Male, getting to be 50 years old, and yet goddammit I have no problem with a woman as President. I've worked alongside enough women, had women bosses as much as men bosses, met women smarter than me (my high school valedictorian and salutatorian were both women!) and met women more spiritual than me. Women have brains and souls and heart and ambition just like men. Why the hell aren't other White Guys able to accept that?

And yet the horrifying thing: The Democratic base might be right. There's still far too much misogyny in the mainstream media, still too much fear of women in power across our culture and boardrooms and homesteads.

It's just... it's painful to watch a party that's SUPPOSED to stand for diversity to succumb to that pressure and not fight the good fight. I understand the fear: trump is too dangerous to gamble on appealing to the better angels of our nation's nature right now.

But it's going to prolong the problem. We're going to run into this roadblock NEXT election cycle, and the one after that, and so on. At some point, we as a nation HAVE to address the reality that women can be capable as men when it comes to leadership.

Emily argued this too:

Anyone who hasn’t had those experiences, or known what it’s like to plan an entire day and an entire life around the possibility of sexual assault or harassment, or what it’s like to be the only one of your gender in a room marked by power, or what it’s like to have your reproductive freedom legislated by people with different reproductive organs — simply brings a different sensibility to the issues that shape the lives of 164 million Americans. It matters that women are so often absent from the halls of power, and it’s well past time for one to be in the White House.

At some point, the legacies of Victoria Woodhull and Margaret Chase Smith and Shirley Chisholm and Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren ought to lead to a woman candidate standing there on Election Night celebrating the broken glass ceiling to end all glass ceilings.

I'm tired of the heartbreak. I'm tired of running into stuff like this. I'm not the only one, I know, and this isn't going to hurt me the way it's hurting millions of women still lacking that representation. Where would my compassion and hope and humanity not be while there is something as painful as this still happening? This doesn't help me (other than competent leadership for the United States again), it would help all of them, and that would have been something happy to root for.

I wish I had better, happier things to write about anymore.