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it through the painful parts. Divorce. Disappointments. Deaths. Whenever things got really tough, I would pull out that story .... I’d hear my daddy’s voice, and I’d always feel better.
Running for president, Warren has pulled the story out of her pocket repeatedly, using her mother’s minimum wage job as an example of an era when Americans could support families on such an income. She has purged it of her mother’s defeatism, but those resentments still make themselves felt. In speeches, in a mawkish practice carried over from her autobiography, she constantly and warmly refers to “my daddy,” with the twang of a country singer. By comparison, Pauline Herring is referred to stiffly as “my mother,” and only rarely as “my momma.” While her affection for her father is clear, the unconscious animus toward her mother begins to establish another, distracting agenda.
She often introduces herself, as she did at Grinnell College in Iowa last November, by revealing that “I am what used to be called a late-in-life baby.” She stays with it, insisting that in her family, her brothers were always called “the boys,” but “my mother always just called me ‘the surprise!’” It’s her idea of a laugh line, and the audience does laugh, a little. But there are layers of discomfiture here. Aside from its irrelevance, the confession plays into yet another form of bias, the perception that women aren’t funny—because this isn’t funny. It’s more Sally Field than Fleabag, a plea for sympathy in which Warren compares herself with “the boys,” perpetuating a veiled sense of gender resentment. This too is an unforced error, and a minor one compared to the unfortunate Medicare roll-out or the completely avoidable claims to Native American heritage, which touched off Trump’s “Pocahontas” frenzy. But it’s too bad, since she’s capable of coming up with a deadpan comeback. (Asked how she’d reply to an “old-fashioned” supporter who favored marriage between a man and a woman, she said, “I’m going to assume it is a guy who said that. And I’m going to say, ‘Well, then, just marry one woman. I’m cool with that. Assuming you can find one.’”) Yet on the chaotic, inconclusive night of the Iowa caucuses, she was still playing the Okie card, declaring that “as the baby daughter of a janitor, I’m so grateful to be up on this stage tonight,” asking voters to overlook a Harvard career and lifetime of experience, and instead see her as daddy’s little girl.
“Fight” is a word she employs with numbing regularity. She used some version of it in her announcement speech twenty-five times. To donate to her campaign, text “FIGHT.” Her book titles sound like college football fight songs—A Fighting Chance and This Fight Is Our Fight. But for Warren, especially when it comes to sexism, talk of fighting has taken the place of actually fighting, which would mean confronting misogyny directly. When Barack Obama, arguably one of the most nimble and preternaturally gifted presidential candidates in American history, attacked racism in his pivotal speech in 2008, he took it seriously, analyzing it incisively and at length. The fight against misogyny will take far more than lip service or pinky promises or the use of slogans such as “Women win!”
Warren appears to fear what former Obama strategist David Axelrod calls her “lecturing,” said to be objectionable to white voters without a college education, and thus spends less time deploying her teaching skills and more indulging in cheerleading, couched in the apologetic, accommodationist pattern of women’s speech. This can be heard when she mentions her divorce and remarriage. Channeling Dr. Seuss, she calls her husbands H1 and H2, saying “Bruce, known as H2, I’ve held on to him and he’s a good guy! You bet!” But the pep rally vim only underscores the awkwardness professional women feel in trying to ingratiate themselves, struggling to be likable.
Warren is reportedly gifted at oneon-one meetings, and her legendary selfie lines are proof of the physical stamina and emotional flexibility that Sanders and Biden lack. But presidential campaigns are overwhelmingly public performances in which candidates must convincingly assume the mantle of leadership, working the levers of inspiration, excitation, and, on occasion, mass delusion. In that arena, Warren’s personal and autobiographical speeches contrast sharply with the brisker, policy-driven pitches of her male rivals. Springing to the podium to Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five,” she’s the spunky gal from 1980s send-ups of sexism, recalling the day when her first teaching contract was not renewed when she became “visibly pregnant,” a line that elicits sympathetic groans from the audience. (It also inspired right-wing taunts and claims of exaggeration.) Her shorthand reference to her next pregnancy—“baby on hip, three years of law school, graduated visibly pregnant”—likewise harks back to the “barefoot and pregnant” tropes of an earlier time, inviting commiseration but not action.
Amy Klobuchar, whose campaign unexpectedly leapt ahead of Warren’s in New Hampshire, has argued the issue more effectively. She describes what she did in response to similar discrimination, citing her 1995 maternity ward ordeal, when she was asked to leave the hospital after twenty-four hours in compliance with insurance rules, even as her baby was suffering complications. A few months later, she brought six “visibly pregnant” friends to a Minnesota state hearing, successfully lobbying to end the hospital-stay limit.
Warren’s experiences are recognizable—no woman who remembers the 1970s could question them—and, for a certainty, her campaign is being held to a different standard. When a black man whose middle name is shared by a notorious despot ran for president, he too had to run an almost impossibly disciplined and flawless race. Whatever woman is going to win the highest office will have to display the same “ruthless pragmatism,” as Obama put it, that he brought to the job, the unswervingly calm, eloquent, uncompromising leadership that lays doubt to rest. The few women who have held on to long-term power across the centuries, from Elizabeth I to Margaret Thatcher and Nancy Pelosi, have always wielded that ruthlessness. When you’re in a knife fight, you don’t ask to be liked. n —February 13, 2020