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In article <t1lkg9$34861$3@news.freedyn.de>
Gronk <invalide@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Pocahontas would do worse than Hillary Clinton.

If Elizabeth Warren "had a penis" would she be president today?
This is among the burning questions contemplated in Electable:
Why America Hasn't Put a Woman in the White House … Yet by NBC
News correspondent Ali Vitali, who spent the 2020 Democratic
primary covering Warren and other prominent female candidates
such as Amy Klobuchar and eventual VP nominee Kamala Harris.

"Everyone comes up to me and says, ‘I would vote for you, if you
had a penis,'" Warren fumed to Vitali after the candidate's
disappointing third-place finish in the Iowa caucus. She ended
her campaign two months later as the last (semi-viable) woman
standing.

Are Democratic voters really that sexist? Probably. Warren has a
history of making things up about herself and telling stories
that are too good to be true, but who's to say? It's a
comforting thought for her supporters—the mainstream journalists
and other college-educated professionals who were "baffled" she
didn't win the primary because all their friends voted for her.

This includes Vitali, who asked Warren after she dropped out of
the race what her "message would be to the women and girls who
feel like [they] are left with two white men to decide between?"
At least that's how it's presented in the book. What the
reporter actually said was "I wonder what your message would be
to the women and girls who feel like we're left with two white
men to decide between." (Emphasis added.) The revised version
sounds more professional.

Vitali, to her credit, avoids the blatant partisan hackery that
many of her fellow journalists are unable to resist when
discussing the subject of women in politics. She highlights the
success of Republican women in earnest, and does not insist on
explaining how it doesn't really count because their policies
are "bad for women." But it's pretty obvious which team she's
pulling for.

Washington Post columnist David Byler correctly observed in 2019
that "many journalists either match the demographic profile of
[Warren's] base or live around people who do," while the
candidate's "view of politics closely matches the prevailing
media view of what politics ‘should' be." It's a view inclined
toward lengthy academic discussions about how sexism prevents
bad female candidates from winning elections.

The book sets out to answer a fairly specific question: Why did
Democratic primary voters choose Joe Biden, as opposed to Warren
or any of the six female candidates who ran, to face Donald
Trump in 2020?

It's not a very difficult question. Democrats really wanted to
beat Trump, and Biden was Barack Obama's vice president for
eight years. Nevertheless, Vitali persists in providing a
lengthy academic analysis based on Ivy League studies of "gender
dynamics" and "sexist undercurrents" to argue the 2020 election
"laid bare some concerning realities" about how "Americans may
still be easily scared off from believing that women can be
viable, trusted, winning options."

Electable was written for college-educated professionals who
enjoy having these discussions and find them meaningful. It was
written by a college-educated professional who works in the
media and covers politics, two industries dominated by college-
educated professionals. It relies on expert commentary and
analysis from college-educated professionals who all basically
agree with each other and are well-versed in the corporate-
academic jargon of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Pages upon pages comprised of slightly different versions of the
following sentence: "‘We think of them as different,' Madeline
Heilman, a psychology professor at New York University and
expert in bias and gender stereotypes, told me of how society
conceptualizes leadership qualities between the genders."

Vitali describes feeling "pressure" to maintain a "level playing
field and uniform metric of assessment" for female candidates
attempting to "topple the patriarchy." She pounds the shift key
for added emphasis to call out the "White Men of Political
Media" who always ruin things, and at one point endeavors to
"unpack [the] arguments" in a Chris Cillizza article. She
recalls emailing colleagues to celebrate a "mainstream
discussion of female rage," and laments the toxicity of
"whitewashed feminism."

The book is well-reported and deeply sourced, so occasionally an
insightful comment slips through. In the words of one anonymous
strategist: "Democrats have to acknowledge we do not fully
understand a good chunk of this country." Indeed they do not.
The results of the 2020 primary suggest Democrats don't fully
understand a good chunk of their own voters, most of whom are
not college-educated professionals who read Rebecca Traister and
celebrate "allyship" and pretend to care about the WNBA.

Christina Reynolds, a former Hillary Clinton staffer, offers a
simple suggestion regarding women who run for public office: "We
don't have to view them as candidates who are women, but just
candidates, right?" Sure, but the Democratic establishment
(which includes most journalists) would never allow it. They are
part of the problem.

"We require women, and women of color, to explain themselves
more to us—which is on us, not on them," a former Kamala Harris
aide tells Vitali. "She'd be asked all the time, ‘What is it
like being a Black woman running for president?'" Yes, because
journalists are obsessed with identity politics and insist on
talking about it. Perhaps this is one of the reasons they are so
out of touch with the general public, the vast majority of which
does not share this weird fixation.

Politics really does attract the most obnoxious people. Vitali
recounts a particularly grim scene she witnessed on the campaign
trail in Iowa in November 2019, when dozens of Warren staffers
decked out in "Liberty Green" (the campaign's official color)
braved the freezing rain outside the convention center in Des
Moines while chanting, "We stan! We stan! We stan a woman with a
plan!"

When Vitali cites studies that show women are less likely than
men to consider running for office or even "to consider elective
office a desirable profession," the implication is that society
is wrong. Maybe women are right.

Women like Jennifer C., for example, who penned the following
review of Electable on Amazon: "Too big. I measured the dog per
the instructions and he falls in the middle of the XL size
range, but it's way too big – slides around and droops terribly.
*NOT ELIGIBLE FOR RETURN OR EXCHANGE* :("

Electable: Why America Hasn't Put a Woman in the White House …
Yet
by Ali Vitali
Dey Street Books, 352 pp., $28.99

https://freebeacon.com/culture/if-pocahontas-had-a-penis/

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