Was Elizabeth Warren your candidate? Don’t despair, our time is coming (pinky swear)
NewsColony
I surely wasn’t the only one who felt that way, because suddenly we were watching Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand shutting down Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower in New York City with thousands of supporters, ready to take Trump down.
There was Sen. Kamala Harris in Oakland, California, with a massive crowd of supporters eager to launch her into the race.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar stood outside in a blizzard to announce her candidacy with a hearty, half-frozen, enthusiastic army of supporters in a field in Minnesota.
And there was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, taking the stage in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to the sounds of Dolly Parton’s feminist anthem ”9 to 5” blaring over the loudspeakers as supporters enthusiastically waved American flags, shouting back in support and eagerly clapping for her populist message.
With these women in the race, surely one of them could pierce that glass ceiling at long last, right? RIGHT?
Enter reality. A constant, perplexing media narrative asking if these women were “electable” took hold and never relented, sowing doubt even in the minds of women who supported these candidates. Time and again, suburban women I know would say to me, I love Elizabeth Warren, but should I vote for Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders? Can she win? Hadn’t everyone seen the success of female candidates in 2018? Hadn’t Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes?
One by one, these women were held to standards not applied to men. One by one, their qualifications, their demeanor, their “electability” were questioned, while less-qualified men with deep pockets and scant policy were deemed more likable. More electable. More progressive. That’s not to say that these women didn’t each have her own faults or failures, but their challenges were magnified in a way their male competitors’ simply were not.
I’m taking Warren’s exit hard this week, but if I’m being honest with you, I knew how this story was going to end last fall after talking with a Never Trump Republican friend who wanted to discuss the candidates to get a feel for who I was backing. I wish I could tell you that I made the case for Elizabeth Warren, but I was shut down from the jump. The mere mention of her provoked such a strange, almost visceral reaction. My heart sank. I felt sick. That conversation ended with me getting in my car, driving down the road, and pulling over to have a cry, out of sight of my “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” friend. I knew right then and there that it wasn’t Warren’s time. Which meant that it wasn’t our time. Again. And that hurt so very deeply. For me, for my stepdaughters, my granddaughter, for all the women I know who had believed it was our time.
Warren’s exit is tapping into the pain a lot of women felt in 2016. I think back to the days in the immediate aftermath of that election, when Indivisible groups sprang up nationwide and people, mostly women, came together to mourn. There were a lot of tears, a lot of anger, and then there was a lot of activism. That energy activism resulted in massive wins at the ballot box in 2018. I’ll never understand why this electorate has decided to turn back from that momentum. It must be collective PTSD after seeing a female candidate go down to such an unqualified, incompetent, corrupt fool.
Throughout her campaign, Elizabeth Warren got down on her knees to talk with little girls who’ve come to see her at their level, offering her pinky finger and a promise. Locking their fingers together, she’s told thousands of little girls that she’s running for office because “that’s what girls do.” Back home in Massachusetts today as she announced her exit, Warren said that the hardest part of exiting the race was thinking of all those little girls who were going to have to keep waiting for that glass ceiling to be shattered.
Indeed it is hard. But hear this: Four years from now or eight years from now, our time is coming. We will not give up. We are going to shatter that ceiling.
So, as I did in 2016, I’m going to shed some tears. I’m going to rage. And then I’m going to get back to work. Because if there is one thing this group of women has taught me, and Elizabeth Warren has taught me in particular, it is that we will persist. It’s what girls (and women) do. Pinky swear.
Source: Daily Kos NewsColony: Politics
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