Why Elizabeth Warren is perfect to go first.
Elizabeth Warren is the first to throw her hat in the ring, and she’s the perfect one for this job.
When the news broke yesterday on the last day of 2018 that Elizabeth Warren was officially tossing her name in the Goblet of Fire that is now how we are going to choosing our candidates, most democrats, including myself said nah. She’s not going to win the nomination. I am a Harris kind of girl. But Liz? Oh, Liz, thank you. Thank you for going first. We are lucky to have you on the front line.
We are two years into Mango Mussolini’s terrifying, torturous, and yet wildly ineffective rule and as the smoke has cleared we have had quite a reckoning, haven’t we? We see more clearly every day as they release the Russian mis-information how gullible we were. We see how the media skewered a woman so tough she braved the cold with pneumonia to honor the fallen saying she was weak, sickly. We saw Secretary Clinton lied about, slandered, and all the while the real story was Trump…a man afraid of a little rain.
We women know this story in our souls. In smaller scales, it happens to almost all of us at one point or another. Most of us also know that speaking out about it often makes it worse, and character slander is the first weapon. So, like millions of us who have been too smart at our job, too ambitious, or just too good, Hillary kept her nose down and tried to get the important information out there. The plans, the policies. But no one was listening; a salacious story is far more interesting. Who wants to talk economic policy when there is a sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor?(there wasn’t) Certainly not us, who spent most of high school gossiping about the student council president who dared to be a girl and was probably sleeping with a teacher.
We saw people willing to believe the most absurd lies about Secretary Clinton and ignore the truly absurd truth about You Know Who. We saw her accomplishments negated and her forced to shoulder the blame for things done TO her, not by her. We watched that rapey walking ball of spittle Chris Matthews make jokes about drugging her water and raping her without any consequences. Joking about drugging the “Queen’s” water. We watched Chuck Todd mock her for being “over prepared” and host panels on how the slogan and hashtag I’m With Her was egotistical. It would have been the most basic journalism to know a candidate’s slogan. It was sloppy, lazy and misogynistic to not bother to mention that her actual slogan was Stronger Together. It was all over her ads, busses and podiums. Her supporters had started #ImwithHer because we were invisible, even in our large numbers. While we called it out and tried to get the truth out there by the millions we were ignored and mocked. Despite our hard work and passion the tv repeated over and over “No one likes her.” We knew that “No one” meant women, people of color, LGBQT, and especially black women. No One liked her by the millions and fought the good fight.
Secretary Clinton and soon to be Speaker Pelosi are brilliant politicians. They’ve both sent the message to other democrats “say what you need to say, just win”.
But Liz? She’s not like that, oh she is a brilliant politician, but she’s got a mouth on her. A beautiful, glorious mouth and despite attempts to muzzle her…she can’t be quiet. She, like me and so many others, can’t just sit back and take it. She screams from the rooftops how messed up and misogynistic that shit is. She is not afraid to speak out loudly, and sometimes wrongly. Elizabeth Warren will draw all the ire, all the slander and lies that Secretary Clinton did and then some. Her Native American ancestry will be brought up constantly and used against her, (using ancestry as a weapon sucks) her Pocahontas nickname, front and center. She will need to address living as a white women and using her ancestry as an accessory. Some criticisms will be very valid, as some were against Secretary Clinton. How she handles those will be interesting.
There is simply no way we are not going to see a replay of 2016 when if comes to female candidates. It started almost immediately. Senator Harris is a “Cop”, Pelosi is “Old Guard”, etc. etc. etc. Stacey Abrams who is far more liberal than Beto has already been relegated to the history book while Biden and Beto are held up.
We haven’t quite figured out what to do with women who are smarter than most of the men in the room. We can’t embrace them. We don’t know how to forgive women for being ambitious, we assume they must have nefarious motives. We find them untrustworthy. The most powerful women in all the fairy tales and stories we grew up with were always the Evil Queens or evil women in power. Clinton is Queen Grimhilde offering a poison apple, Pelosi is Cruella De Vil, Harris: Maleficent.
Warren is the Queen of Hearts, wild and shouting, passing edicts as she goes. Warren will call it all out, and the fact that she will probably not be the nominee should free her to do so even more. She is perfect to go first, because she can take it and give it back. She won’t take it lying down playing a long game political strategy. No, she will be mouthy as fuck about it all and she will make ridiculous videos and I will be right behind her magnifying it in every way I can. She has the opportunity to use her natural strengths, to be a polarizing magnifying glass for all of this. If I was a democratic strategist I would be giddy over this; she can take the heat and call it out while they build momentum for one of the other fantastic candidates on our roster. As a democratic woman and I am filled with glee at this thought. By doing this she will only make it easier for female candidates who come after her from here on out. As Secretary Clinton did and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm before her. We left Secretary Clinton beaten and bruised on the battlefield and then watched as she was blamed for her own destruction. Warren? She is reactionary, she has to call that out when it happens to her, even if she wasn’t mouthy enough when it happened to Clinton.
Every moment we are made more aware of what we as a collective nation do to intelligent, ambitions, women who dare to think they know what to do is a moment of progress. Elizabeth Warren won’t take it lying down, she will lash back and make us see it in the ugly light of day.
As they say knowledge is power; and Warren, if she remains free to speak has a chance to give us a real education. If she keeps calling this out and if she secures the party nomination, I will be right there campaigning for her. She will have more than earned my vote.
Don’t let us down, Liz. Give ’em hell!
