Shakesville founder Melissa McEwan has two great posts up today about Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and how the narratives around their potential presidential runs parallels the war on women's agency. Both are must reads.
Here's an excerpt from Women, Amirite?
And here is the opening paragraph of EJ Dionne's latest column about Senator Elizabeth Warren:
Elizabeth Warren is cast as many things: a populist, a left-winger, the paladin against the bankers and the rich, the Democrats' alternative to Hillary Clinton, the policy wonk with a heart.
The Democrats' alternative to Hillary Clinton. Despite the fact that Warren has said repeatedly that she isn't running for president in 2016.
Here is Dionne's second paragraph:
The senior senator from Massachusetts is certainly a populist and her heart is with those foreclosed upon and exploited by shady financial practices. But she is not nearly as left-wing as many say — she can offer a strong defense of capitalism that's usually overlooked. And here's betting that she won't run against Clinton.
That seems like a pretty safe bet, considering she has repeatedly said she's not running.
Nor has Clinton announced that she's running.
This sort of speculation is par for the course in US presidential politics—but what is not par for the course is having two female politicians considered viable potential candidates for the presidency from the same party.
And commentators are pretending like that doesn't require a different sensitivity than it does when it's nothing but a solid field of male candidates as far as the eye can see.
Right now, we are living in a time in the US in which the narrative that women don't know our own minds is being used to justify all kinds of reprehensible legislation to create barriers to access to reproductive healthcare.
And a time in the US in which the narrative that women casually lie about subjects as grave as sexual violence is being used to justify the routine denial of justice for assaults against us.
The last f----- thing we need is a bunch of male commentators trading on the "women don't know their own minds" narrative and "women say one thing but mean another" narrative in any way at all.
It is frankly irresponsible to continually talk about Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren as lying about their presidential ambitions and/or not knowing what they really want.
This carries on a theme that she talked about in an earlier post about just Clinton, who has yet to decide whether she will run in 2016. She sympathizes with the conundrum Clinton is in, in her piece,
More Great Mysteries of Life:
...irrespective of whether one feels that Clinton projected an air of entitlement the last time around, it's manifest garbage to lay that at her feet at this point. If she announced her candidacy more than two years ahead of the election, she'd certainly be accused of entitlement, but somehow not announcing her candidacy, for whatever reason, also gets construed as a belief that her nomination is inevitable...
...Meanwhile, even people in her own party are happy to assist the media in promulgating the meme that she's definitely made up her mind, but is just playing games with the announcement. This is just routinely taken as truth, despite the fact that it's easy to imagine Clinton's decision might be affected by how the midterm elections shake out.
If the Republicans retake the majority in the Senate, as well as retaining their majority in the House, it will be extraordinarily difficult for a Democratic president to be an effective president. Clinton's so ubiquitously framed as a voraciously ambitious harridan who just wants to be president for the sake of being president that commentators don't seem to imagine that she might have some interest in being a successful president.
I don't think Hillary Clinton just wants to be president. I think Hillary Clinton wants to govern.
And a wall of Republican Congressional obstructionism would make the kind of governance she wants to do all but impossible. If that's not something she's taking into consideration, I would be shocked. Because she is a good politician. And a smart politician.
Funny how she is ruthlessly calculating when people want to demean her, but never so when they want to compliment her. Or even see her as a human being making a very human decision.
Anyway. This is the s--- that's going on when she's not even running. She knows damn well what will be unleashed if she decides to run. Again, it's a real mystery why she might be reluctant.
Even as she somehow simultaneously conveys to the world that she is INEVITABLE!
I don't have much to add to this, other than it's been frustrating for me to see Elizabeth Warren's own words and statements so easily dismissed, as well as the ongoing framework of Hillary Clinton as an ambitious, power-hungry shrew, which seems to be how she's characterized no matter what she does.
I think it's important that progressives listen to what feminists are saying during this ramp-up to the next election. McEwan's is an expert on this; I'm not. But I feel a little more aware every time I read her work.
I also have serious misgivings about how Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren are already being pitted against each other, as if only one of them can exist on the national stage as a Democratic leader, and that their clearly mutual respect is somehow less than genuine.
You can build one woman up without tearing another down. Both women are extraordinary Democrats from a generation that had limited opportunities for women, and they have always found a way to serve, to fight for their ideals, and to give voice to the powerless. We're a better party, and a better country, with both of them as leaders.