“Everyone comes up to me,” Senator Liz Warren (D-Mass.) told NBC Capitol Hill correspondent Ali Vitali on a plane to the New Hampshire primary, “and says, ‘I would vote for you if you had a penis.’”
They never say this to Hillary.
Vitali enjoyed “a front-row seat to a defining issue of the Democratic primary” in 2020. As a result, says POLITICO Magazine, her new book explores the question: “Why haven’t we had a woman in the White House?”
It’s a 3,900-word excerpt that POLITICO ran on Friday. I’ll spare you and deliver the one highlight:
“I’m responding to what people wanna hear,” Warren told us plainly, with a characteristically biting edge in her voice. She spoke sometimes as if all the annoyance and frustration she had about the political system simmered right on the edge of her words, teeming on the top of her teeth, threatening to spill over.
We’d talked about the dynamics of Iowa, her competitors and the pressure she put on herself not “to screw this up.” But here and now she offered her plainest view of the landscape yet: “Everyone comes up to me and says, ‘I would vote for you, if you had a penis.’”
“Alex,” I said, “I’ll take ‘Things That Never Happened’ for $400, please.”
Somewhat more seriously, that’s where POLITICO chose to end their excerpt from Vitali’s Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House… Yet.
Warren’s outrageous, unbelievable, untrue claim is just left sticking out there, unchallenged, like her purely theoretical penis.
Given the state of medical technology, Warren could always get a penis if she really wanted one.
So let’s imagine — sorry! — for just a moment that Warren’s currently theoretical penis were made real.
Would that make her a better, more electable candidate?
Would a penis fix that “characteristically biting edge in her voice”?
What is it about having a penis that would have prevented the “deeply inauthentic” candidate from proclaiming, “I’m gonna get me a beer” on Instagram during her flailing presidential run?
Does the Y chromosome possess some special magic that prevents people from making easily disproved claims about Native American genes?
If Liz Warren had a penis, would it make people forget that she got rich shilling for the very corporations she pretends to fight against?
Or that she enjoyed hefty salaries for part-time Ivy League teaching positions made possible in part by her faux Cherokee heritage?
Would a penis give Warren the authenticity and likability she so clearly lacks?
No. No to all of it.
The question isn’t why women like Warren can’t get elected president. The question is why Democrats attract such lousy female candidates.
Recommended: Salman Rushdie Stabbed on Stage in New York
Join the conversation as a VIP Member