One of the rich, infuriating possibilities the huge 2020 Democratic presidential primary field offers us is the chance to go beyond “What if Bernie was Bernice” as a thought experiment on gender and politics. There are so many candidates—and even more than one woman—and finally, we can ask: What if Pete was Patricia? What if Joe was Joanne? What if Beto was Becky?
The Bernie example has been done plenty of times and it was like shooting fish in a barrel the first time: Bernice would at best be the local cranky city council member, but she would more likely be the local loudmouth who writes letters to the editor and shows up at city council meetings to harangue the members. A woman with Bernie Sanders’ disdain for personal appearance and equal disdain for playing nice with the routine fodder of media political coverage would face so much steeper a climb that we simply wouldn’t be talking about her, no matter how popular the substance of her ideas. And let’s say a young, smoother-edged Bernice had gotten herself elected to Congress more than a quarter-century ago. If you think she’d be a credible presidential candidate saying things like “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too” while ignoring her six-figure salary … you funny.
What about Joanne? She’s a woman with decades of Senate experience and two terms as vice president, during which she became a popular figure. But come on … she also had two seriously failed presidential primary runs, she’s 76 years old, and hoo boy did she do and say a lot of problematic stuff during her years in the Senate. Mostly, though, isn’t she just sort of old news? And, um, this is sort of awkward to say, but she does a lot of touching, and maybe being extra flirty and feminine is how a woman needed to act to get ahead in her day, but at her age isn’t it kind of pathetic?
Becky? She was exciting for a minute, but that minute is over, and the way she talks about her kids? Next!
Patricia? Ambitious to an unseemly degree. Who does she think she is, running for president at 37 years old, without having held federal or statewide office? Where are her policies? [Note: If she released policies, the question would be why she was wonky and uninspiring. The fact that she’d spent her life doing well at school and learning languages would be taken as further evidence of opportunism, and her command of those languages, or lack thereof, would be heavily picked over.]
If this seems unfair, well, sure, it’s a crude distillation you’d rarely see in so many words coming from a respectable publication. That’s rarely, though—not never—and it is a distillation of the narratives we see about women. There is always an easy stereotype or nasty jibe waiting around every corner.
The thing you hear about Kirsten Gillibrand is that she’s too ambitious or opportunistic. She should have kept her mouth shut about Al Franken, like a good girl. Shouldn’t have moved to the left when she went from being a House member for a swing district to a senator for all of New York. And as we know, women don’t get to be ambitious without paying a price.
But come on, now—too ambitious? I would refer you back to Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke. Gillibrand doesn’t hold a candle to either of them in the ambition department, yet she’s the one who’s tarred.
The media may not have quite settled on the definitive Kamala Harris, Problem Woman narrative yet, but it’s tried on quite a few. There was the “slept her way to the top” one, because she dated former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown decades ago. There was that nonsense USA Today op-ed about guns. And, of course, it’s hard to disentangle race from gender here: She’s not black enough, she’s too black, she’s trying too hard at one or the other, she’s married to a white man. It’s impressive that Harris has thus far eluded the full-on, narrative-setting hot take, but the number of tries at it shows that it’s coming, and it will happen on terms that a man, never mind a white one, wouldn’t face. If they don’t find anything better, look for the Willie Brown story to come back full force, even though “It is difficult to find any successful politician in San Francisco who does not have history with Brown,” and we know Harris rose on her own merits because she was not elected San Francisco district attorney, then California attorney general, and ultimately senator, until years after their relationship.
Amy Klobuchar is, by most accounts, really that bad of a boss, and yes, abusive male bosses in politics have drawn coverage on enough occasions to conclude it’s not all about sexism. But you’d have to work hard to convince me that a generic-but-for-the-staff-abuse white male senator and former prosecutor from the Midwest wouldn’t be getting more attention.
Elizabeth Warren, we’re told, is Just Not Charismatic or Likable. Except remember how her charisma and likability on The Daily Show and so on made her a viable Senate candidate? Remember when articles about or videos of Warren were basically guaranteed to get widespread social media sharing? Yeah, funny the timing of how that changed. And it’s not just 2019: Sady Doyle shows how local Massachusetts media was wondering why Warren was so unlikable locally back in 2012 when liberals everywhere else thought of her as charismatic. Audiences at presidential forums keep being surprised at her charisma—almost like the message coming from the media doesn’t match what people see in person. And likable? Please.
“Unconscious bias is running for president again. Unconscious bias has always been in the race, and Unconscious Bias’s best buddy, Institutional Discrimination, has always helped him along, and as a result all of our presidents have been men and all but one white, and that was not even questionable until lately,” Rebecca Solnit wrote. “This makes who ‘seems presidential’ a tautological ouroboros chomping hard on its own tail.” So many things have been written and will be written about how gendered this race is. What’s sad is that they will continue to be true, and they will continue to be made true by people who believe they’re doing nothing of the sort.