Warren, Klobuchar expose the sexist view of women, winning

Would a female Democratic nominee have a harder time beating Donald Trump than a male one?

I can’t tell you, because I don’t have a crystal ball and because it’s a stupid question, its answer dependent on which female candidate you’re talking about, on how she runs her campaign, on the twists and turns of the national conversation between now and November.

But I can tell you this: Either of the two women among the six candidates on the stage in Des Moines on Tuesday night would give Trump a serious run for his money. Both have earned the right to take him on. Both would be formidable presidents.

And both made clear, with commanding performances, how absurd it is that this country hasn’t yet shattered its highest glass ceiling.

I’m focusing on Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar because during the most electric stretch of this seventh Democratic primary debate, the focus was on them, or rather, on the idea that their party couldn’t risk nominating one of them at a juncture when getting rid of a Republican incumbent is so vital.

You know the back story. According to recent media reports, Warren and Bernie Sanders met last year to discuss their nascent presidential campaigns and he told her he didn’t believe a woman could win the 2020 election. Sanders denies it.

He denied it again on Tuesday night. Instead of quibbling about the conversation, what Warren did was more effective, and certainly more stirring: She drew a contrast between the two women and the four men in the debate, the final one before the Iowa caucuses.

That contrast was perfect, and got better still when Klobuchar chimed in, because what the two women said brilliantly cast them not as trailblazers who had something extra to prove, not as outsiders who had finagled a way in, not as underdogs urging voters to take some extraordinary leap of faith, not as high-minded gambles. They turned the stubborn, sexist notion that their presence and presidential ambitions were exotic on its head, citing yardsticks by which they were demonstrably superior to their male rivals.

“I think the best way to talk about who can win is by looking at people’s winning record,” Warren, a second-term senator from Massachusetts, said. “Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections.” She didn’t name the men or the elections, but Joe Biden is the veteran of two previous, miserably unsuccessful campaigns for the presidency. Pete Buttigieg lost bids to become the treasurer of Indiana and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In contrast, Warren said, “The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women: Amy and me. And the only person who has beaten an incumbent Republican any time in the past 30 years is me.”

Klobuchar, a third-term senator from Minnesota, said you don’t need to be male to win just as you don’t need other qualities pronounced necessary or optimal by some unnamed, amorphous committee of pronouncers.

“You don’t have to be the skinniest person in the room,” she said. “You don’t have to be the loudest person. You have to be competent.”

I don’t know if Warren or Klobuchar would be the party’s best bet. But on a night when the viability of women aiming for the White House went from subtext to text, these two women found words — not just in addressing that issue but also in talking about prescription-drug prices, climate change, nuclear weapons and more — that exposed the bigotry and shamefulness of doubts about female candidates.

Warren also said this: “Since Donald Trump was elected, women candidates have outperformed men candidates in competitive races. And in 2018, we took back the House; we took back statehouses, because of women candidates and women voters.”

“Back in the 1960s,” she said, “people asked, ‘Could a Catholic win?’ Back in 2008, people asked if an African American could win. In both times the Democratic Party stepped up and said yes, got behind their candidate and we changed America. That’s who we are.”

It was a self-serving edit of history, sure, and it put the most positive gloss possible on the nation’s character. But that didn’t make it any less important. Or any less inspiring.