In the wee morning hours after Tuesday night’s Super Tuesday primary voting across the nation, a CNN panel surmised that the across-the-board rejection of Senator Elizabeth Warren by Democrat voters was due to —you guessed it — sexism.
As Curtis Houck of Newsbusters delineated in his transcript and report, both host Don Lemon and some of his guests could not fathom why Warren got destroyed in primary after primary unless it was because she’s a woman. Houck noted, “At 3:31 a.m. Eastern, CNN spent almost eight minutes bashing Democratic primary voters as sexist heathens for not supporting Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).”
Lemon initiated the slam at Democrat voters for their supposed sexism by prompting, “I want to bring it now to the women who are here to talk about that. You have these women, these very strong, very powerful, very smart women in this race. You had Hillary Clinton, who is defeated despite winning the popular vote. You have Elizabeth Warren who didn’t do well, Amy Klobuchar who has dropped out of this race. You had this very diverse Democratic Party and then you have the women, you have all the white guys who have the delegates. What’s going on here?
After positing that Klobuchar lost because of her lack of money, The Daily Beast’s Jackie Kucinich offered this for Warren: “If just the fact that this ground game did not turn out votes for her, did not get people to the polls for Elizabeth Warren is really — there’s really a lot of digging as to why that didn’t happen, whether it’s sexism, whether it’s the fact someone did just changed their mind. I heard women when I was in Iowa tell me we’re Warren fans, we’re worried that people — they liked Warren, they heard her speak. They went to the polls and then they were worried that a woman couldn’t beat Donald Trump.”
Lemon, pleased that Kucinich agreed, replied, “But you’re reading my mind. I’m wanting — does it say something about the candidate or about the electorate?”
Karen Finney, who was aspokesperson for the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign,offered her own version of the sexism charge: “When it comes to executive office, our country is still very uncomfortable with women in power, and that’s part of why women have to over credential again and again. So in 16, we said, she would be — Hillary Clinton would have been the most qualified, right? You’ve heard — and you also have heard both Klobuchar and Warren and certainly Kamala when she was still talking about their electability and remember that for women what goes into electability is do I think she — I like her? We don’t care if we like male candidates or not. Men come into a race with the expectation that they’re qualified. Women have to prove themselves …”
After Finney opined that the electorate didn’t like when Warren targeted Mike Bloomberg too harshly, Patty Solis Doyle, who was campaign chief of staff for Joe Biden when he ran with Barack Obama in 2008, offered, “I have to say this whole dynamic really upsets me. The fact that we’re even still talking about, well, she can’t go too far, she can’t hit too hard. You know, in 2018 more women than ever before in our history ran for public office. More women than ever won public office. Women are going to be pivotal in this election. We started this presidential election with six women running, more than ever before in an election cycle. We’re down to two, and it really upsets me that someone like Elizabeth Warren who was stellar on the debate stage, had a great organization, smart, tough, had resources, somehow just seemed to — has been like shoved aside and we don’t know why.”