Divided We Fall: Enough with the Warren/Sanders “Feud”
It’s the day after the Iowa debate, and boy do I feel hungover. While the pundits pontificate over who won and who lost, I can tell you who truly lost: Democratic progressives.
On Monday, as Warren and Sanders were duking it out for first place in the Iowa caucuses, CNN ran with a story about a private conversation between Warren and Sanders that took place in 2018:
“The two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential candidates, they should remain civil and avoid attacking one another, so as not to hurt the progressive movement. They also discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters.
Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.
The description of that meeting is based on the accounts of four people: two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two people familiar with the meeting.”
Now, if these accounts were true, who knows why Sanders would say such a thing? Perhaps he was subtly trying to discourage Warren from choosing to run. Maybe, like a lot of other leftists, he blamed Hillary for Trump’s 2016 win and decided it forever proved that no woman can beat Trump.
CNN decided to follow up with Warren, who confirmed these accounts were true, but her response showed she really didn’t see it as a big deal.
After publication of this story, Warren herself backed up this account of the meeting, saying in part in a statement Monday, “I thought a woman could win; he disagreed.”
She probably thought that would be the end of it.
She was wrong.
Sanders’ response, in my opinion, suggested the whole thing could have been a minor miscommunication:
“It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn’t win,” Sanders said. “It’s sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016.”
The salient comment here is “What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could.”
That is truth, and in fact, I’m sure if Sanders becomes the nominee, there is a lot about his candidacy that Trump could weaponize, as well. However, if I point out that Trump would probably weaponize the fact that Sanders is a) Jewish, and b) a socialist, am I suggesting a Jewish socialist can’t beat him? Of course not. However, it would be understandable if that’s the message Warren and others got from such a statement.
Instead of cooler heads examining exactly what both sides claimed they said, and coming to some common ground, especially given the context that Sanders and Warren are friends and have been completely civil with each other up to this point, this private conversation got blown way out of proportion and took on a nuclear aspect that has likely blown up both their campaigns.
Bernie fans were convinced their dear leader couldn’t POSSIBLY be lying about what he said, and Warren must have made the whole thing up just to win the primary. Many of them started promoting a hashtag, #WarrenRefund, on Twitter, posting with melodramatic flourish, without bothering to post proof, that the ActBlue website was downright OVERLOADED with demands by Berners to get their money back from Warren’s campaign.What’s nutty about that hashtag is that I guarantee that not a single person tweeting on it gave a penny to Warren.
#TrustBernie was also trending. I’m sorry but blindly trusting a leader is the sign of a cult, isn’t it?
Then last night, during the debate, despite the fact that there are 100 other questions they could have asked, CNN decided to ask Sanders if he did indeed say that a woman can’t beat Trump. Sanders actually made things worse by suggesting that the entire story is, rather than a misunderstanding, an outright lie, since it would be completely ridiculous to even remotely suggest he would ever think or articulate such a thing.
The moderator then proceeded to ask Warren a follow-up that indicated she didn’t believe Sanders’ refutations.
Warren then ran with a clearly pre-prepared speech attacking sexism in U.S. politics and her male competitors, pointing out that of all of the candidates on the debate stage, only the two women had won every election they’d run.
It all went downhill from there, with Warren and Sanders squabbling over the math of how long ago he beat a Republican, and a post-debate, off-the-mic, tense conversation with mansplaining body language that poor Tom Steyer stumbled into the middle of, looking like a boxing ref trying to break the two apart.
Immediately after the debate, Twitter BLEW UP. Hateful hashtags trended all night: hatred towards Van Jones. Anger towards CNN. Extreme animosity towards Liz Warren. Bernie fans and trollbots were out in full force, crying for blood.
I dipped my toes into the haterade and ended up with a giant headache. There was so much melodrama..people practically wailing in angst because Warren “snubbed” Sanders’ handshake. Lots of vows to NEVER vote for Warren — she’s not only a liar but even WORSE! She’s a CENTRIST! And a DNC shill! And everyone know the DNC cheated Bernie in 2016! There were more claims of people demanding refunds of all their alleged Warren donations.
It got very nasty, very fast.
Despite the late-night comics mining the dispute between Warren and Sanders for laughs, many of us have not been laughing.
And one day later, the media STILL can’t let it go. CNN today: “The Warren/Sanders Feud Just Got a Lot Uglier.” UGH.
This whole thing could have been avoided, in so many ways.
CNN could have decided not to include a question about it at the debate last night — there are a billion other more pressing questions that could have been asked. They could have brought up the news that broke upon the release of Lev Parnas’ Ukraine scandal evidence that Trump and Giuliani associates stalked and potentially threatened to assassinate a U.S. Ambassador. One of them happened to be a prolific Trump donor and buddy who is now running for Congress. Instead, they chose to inflame the Warren/Sanders spat, which was really quite minor in the scheme of things, given their lifelong friendship.
Warren could have chosen not to make the question about whether Bernie lied into a referendum on sexism in politics and whether a woman can beat Trump. In some sense, though, she was proven right, given the nutty hatefest that erupted on Twitter.
Bernie supporters could have chosen not to further fan the flames by throwing out anti-Warren hashtags like #NeverWarren and #WarrenIsaSnake on Twitter all night. These hashtags trended highly because as usual, they were being amplified by Russian bots.
I know this because I typically spend about an hour or so on Twitter testing for bot accounts. I feel that given how trollbots skewed the election for Trump in 2016, it’s my patriotic duty to help snuff them out and report them to Twitter. I really wish Twitter would do a better job eliminating them, but that’s a whole other article I’m working on.
Full disclosure — I’m a Warren supporter. However, unlike many Bernie supporters whom I’ve seen vow to vote for no one BUT Bernie in the general election, I am “blue no matter who.” If Warren doesn’t win the primaries, I would have no problem voting for Bernie over Trump, despite my grave reservations about him, because Trump is a raging dumpster fire baby kidnapping, woman-molesting, misogynistic, lying, narcissistic, alt-right loving white supremacist, evangelical-coddling, fascist, EPA-dismantling MONSTER. I see way too many self-professed “Berners” on social media claiming they would NEVER vote for a “centrist” like Biden, despite the severe ramifications of a second Trump term on the rule of law and our lives, safety, democracy, and sanity.
This makes me extremely concerned, as experts have looked at the data from 2016 and determined that a significant percentage of voters who chose Bernie in the primary selected Trump in the general election. I’m really hoping we don’t see a repeat of that craziness.
I really wish progressives would stop all this fighting because, honestly, the only winners here are a) the media, which is making money off all this clickbait; b) Trump and his Deplorables, who love to see progressives fighting amongst ourselves; c) Putin, who once again is playing “divide and conquer” games on social media; and d) Biden.
Regardless of his debate performance, I would put money on Biden winning the Iowa caucus after all of this. Both Warren AND Sanders look very bad right now. And maybe that was the media’s original intention.
Copyright 2020 S. Wade
