Elizabeth Warren finally quit the race for president this week, about 2 weeks later than she should have. Better late than never, I guess.
In the wake of her withdrawal, the usual suspects in the media started doing what they always do when something impacts the left – they started trying to find something external to blame for their own actions. MSNBC and CNN panels were devoted to “what went wrong” with Warren’s promising campaign and searching for a reason she couldn’t regain the momentum she’d had earlier.
In typical liberal fashion, they looked externally, quickly settling into their “safe space” of blaming society as a whole for something completely of their own doing.
Sexism was the culprit, they declared. The country has never had a female president, and so many knuckle-dragging Americans simply can’t accept the idea of one now, or possibly ever.
There are a lot of problems with this theory, not the least of which is the only people who’ve had the chance to vote for Elizabeth Warren are Democratic Party primary voters, so it’s not the country who rejected her (or didn’t have the chance to), it was them.
Among these problems is the fact that the left-wing media stopped paying attention to her. They built her up, showering her with glowing coverage, fawning panel discussions, and more magazine covers than your average supermodel. That was early on in the race, then it was gone.
Distracted by shiny new candidates like Michael Bloomberg or others who’d over-performed their expectations like Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren faded. Like a new toy a kid plays with non-stop for a week after Christmas, then never touches again, the shine was gone.
Warren went from exciting to boring. The Simpsons made a lot of money off merchandise with “Don’t have a cow, man” emblazoned on it, but you don’t see it anymore because it got played out. Warren’s “I have a plan for that” made her the Clara Peller of 2020 – white-hot for a minute, only to burn out quickly.
Running for president requires media coverage, and Warren got it. After a while, it started to hurt her.
Even dedicated leftists couldn’t help but notice Warren’s 6-week dodge on the question of whether or not her health care plan would raise taxes on the middle class. She wouldn’t answer, and the longer she wouldn’t answer the worse she looked. Bernie Sanders came right out and said his would, Warren tried to dance around the question. Even for liberals, that wasn’t a good look.
Another problem for Warren is she’s a liar. Joe Biden is too, but Warren’s went to the very heart of who she is. Biden tells a story of being arrested in South Africa trying to visit Nelson Mandela, then “clarifies” that he was (allegedly) ushered through a different door at customs by security. His story was a lie, but insignificant from a policy perspective and relatively minor from a guy in the middle stages of dementia.
Warren told a charter school activist that her kids went to public school when her son went to private school. There’s no grey area there. She said she was fired from a teaching job for being pregnant when all the evidence indicates she quit, including an interview she’d given in the past where she said exactly that.
Then there’s her past flipping foreclosed houses and her current attacks on foreclosures, her lack of understanding as to why a father who’d saved for his child’s college might not be a fan of implicitly being called a sucker for not wanting to pay off the student loan debts of people who’d irresponsibly borrowed fortunes for unmarketable degrees.
Worst for Warren, and the thing she could never shake (even though she was never asked about it in 10 debates) was her pretending to be Native American to get jobs. Elizabeth Warren, who is so white that her camouflage in a snow storm is nudity, was touted as the “first woman of color” hired by Harvard Law School. There is no way she didn’t know this at the time, having declared herself as such on her Texas Bar Association card and contributed plagiarized French recipes to a Native American cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow,” which listed her as a Cherokee. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
None of that happened by accident. She didn’t have a good answer for it because there is no good answer for it. She started lying about it back when there was no way to disprove it, and she lied about it in places and in ways no one was likely to bother checking it. Had she not entered politics, it’s unlikely anyone would’ve noticed and she would’ve retired having gotten away with it.
But she did enter politics. And in politics, your opponents don’t care what gender you are, they want to beat you. In that sense, when her history of fraud and hypocrisy was dragged out, Elizabeth Warren was treated like every other candidate. I thought that was what the feminist movement wanted?
Of course, being treated like anyone else is not what feminists want. They want the good stuff, not the bad stuff. But you can’t get special treatment in the name of equal treatment.
In the end, Elizabeth Warren lost because Elizabeth Warren was an awful, dishonest candidate who ran as Bernie-lite. Why vote for Bernie-lite when you can just vote for Bernie?
While all the liberal journalists and pundits try to punch the feminist box on their “woke” cards by lamenting Warren’s demise as proof this country is a horrible, sexist wasteland, it’s important to remember how Amy Klobuchar got such send off when she ended her much more successful campaign. And as Democrats pledge to “do better” in the future (mostly in an attempt to retain the votes of women who only want to vote for a woman because she’s a woman), notice the relative silence over the Democratic National Committee changing the rules to exclude Tulsi Gabbard, an actual woman of color, from the next debate.
Elizabeth Warren was a failure for the same reasons so many progressive Democrats are failures – they are lying, unlikeable hypocrites willing to do or say anything to quench their thirst for power. While she claimed Bloomberg’s scalp along the way, the smoke signals were on the wall the whole time. To the extent sexism played any role in her demise, if any, it was from Democrats. They denied the rest of the country the chance to reject her for any of the other number of reasons she’s spent a lifetime giving us.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter
Join the conversation as a VIP Member