Liberals demand you STOP talking about ELIZABETH WARREN’s LIKABILITY or comparing her to HILLARY
The real problem with questioning Elizabeth Warren’s likability is that she is not likable. If she were, liberals would be happy to talk about it.
Likability as a political asset for a candidate is a “you know it when you see it” quality.
It’s not the same thing as “approval” or “favorability” or whether you actually “like” the candidate. And it’s something that can’t be taught or learned.
I like Ted Cruz and I supported him during the primaries. But I have to admit there’s something about his style as a candidate that renders him not “likable” — his style was a little mechanical, he didn’t seem comfortable joking around on the campaign trail, or interacting spontaneously. I’d vote for him again, regardless of “likability.”
There are other candidate I don’t like who had likability. Obama, G.W. Bush, Clinton — they all had the “likability” factor regardless of whether you liked them. Call it the “who would you rather have a beer with test” — Obama or McCain/Romney? G.W. Bush or Gore/Kerry? Bubba or Dole/H.W. Bush? The person you want to have a beer with may not have the best character or policies, but hey, let’s grab a beer.
It’s not gender-based. I don’t like Nancy Pelosi, but I have to admit that she’s got the “likability” factor — she’s comfortable in her skin in front of cameras and on stage, she can be spontaneous, and she can crack a joke. She’s a ruthless politician (just ask her daughter), but it might be fun to have a beer with her. The most powerful female politician in the country is likable.
Same with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Mock her if you will for her polities and politics, but there’s a reason she’s a rising star with a big following unlike other male or female left-wingers.
Fast forward to Elizabeth Warren.
Warren’s not likable as a politician, whatever she may be like around friends and colleagues. She’s much like Hillary Clinton in that regard. The Warren-Hillary comparison spilled from a lot of lips when Warren announced. She’s not natural or comfortable. She’s prepackaged and wooden. She is who her political consultants want her to be.
I think Warren and her handlers understand this problem. That’s why on the evening she announced, she went on Instagram Live to drink beer.
Is there anything more manufactured? The political consultants want Warren to be the type of politician you want to have a beer with, so they have her drink beer. It wasn’t spontaneous or real, it proved more than anything that Warren doesn’t have that.
The left-wing of the Democrat party knows Warren has this likability problem, and that if she were the nominee, it would hurt her against Trump. So almost the moment Warren launched her campaign, there was an avalanche of articles complaining about people talking about Warren’s likability, and demanding it stop. It’s sexist and misogynistic, they say, because likability is only asked about female candidates.
An article in Politico lit the already simmering fire, Warren battles the ghosts of Hillary:
The anti-Elizabeth Warren narrative was written before the Massachusetts senator even announced she was exploring a presidential run.
She’s too divisive and too liberal, Washington Democrats have complained privately. Her DNA rollout was a disaster — and quite possibly a White House deal-breaker. She’s already falling in the polls, and — perhaps most stinging — shares too many of the attributes that sank Hillary Clinton.
In the year of the woman, it adds up to one unwelcome mat for the most prominent woman likely to be part of the 2020 field. But it also presents an unmistakable challenge: How does Warren avoid a Clinton redux — written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground?
Here are some examples of the demand we stop talking about Warren’s likability and comparing her to Hillary.
Danielle Tcholakian, The Daily Beast, Talking About Elizabeth Warren’s Likability is a Way to Tell Women to Sit Down and Shut Up:
All conversations about the “likability” of a political candidate are sexist, and to claim otherwise is to out oneself as a sexist hiding behind the gauziest veil of cover.
Look no further than the discussion among nameless Washington Democrats about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s supposedly Hillary Clinton-style “unlikability,” as reported by Politico….
What do Warren and Clinton have in common? They are both notably hard-working older women. That’s about their only shared attribute. Clinton doesn’t even wear glasses.
So why, then, is Warren, according to Politico’s Washington Democrats, in danger of being “written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground”?
Because she’s a woman….
Yet nobody hand-wrings over the “likability” of men, in politics or otherwise. Men in politics do not have to be likable.
Moira Donegan, The Guardian, The issue with Elizabeth Warren isn’t likability. It’s sexism:
…. The fact is that Elizabeth Warren is likable. She speaks frankly and in moral terms, avoiding the cajoling sliminess of politicians such as the reptilian Texas senator Ted Cruz, or her probable Democratic primary opponent, New Jersey senator Cory Booker….
But none of this is what we mean when we ask whether or not Elizabeth Warren is “likable”, just as it was not what was meant when that tiresome question was asked about Clinton in the 2016 election cycle. Instead, the question of “likability” as it is applied to women candidates has become a kind of cipher through which pundits, strategists and ordinary Americans discuss our collective discomfort with women in power.
The claim that a woman candidate is not “likable” is a code for saying she defies our shared cultural understanding that power and authority are implicitly male, and that women who claim them are illegitimate, threatening or breaking the rules. If it were possible for Warren to be “likable”, under this rubric, it would only be if she were able to adhere to prevailing ideas of what is appropriate behavior for her sex – that is, if she were not seeking public office at all.
Ashton Pittman, NBC News, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and the sexist hypocrisy of the ‘likability’ media narrative. Here we go again.:
The same day Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced plans to seek the 2020 Democratic nomination, the sexist media narratives of elections gone by staged a comeback in the form of a Politico article highlighting concerns that Warren may share too many “attributes” with Hillary Clinton to be “likable.”
For 2016 supporters of Clinton — who has often been described as “disconnected,” “flawed,” “polarizing,” and “unlikable”— the adjectives Politico ascribed to Warren sounded awfully familiar….
There are many reasons why likability is a flawed metric for political candidates, men and women alike. But there is something particularly pernicious about the recent trend of evaluating women this way. Research has shown again and again that powerful women are held to different standards than men. …
Likability has long since outlived its speculative usefulness. And there is no clearer an example than Elizabeth Warren’s contradictory treatment in the press. Women do not become unlikable overnight. At this rate, the only likable female president would be one who didn’t want the job.
Warren jumped on the notion that her likability was a sexist topic:
But by far the most high profile assault on questions of likability came from Dave Weigel and Annie Linsky in The Washington Post, Before you run against Trump, you have to run against Hillary (if you’re a woman):
Just hours after Elizabeth Warren announced her plans to run for president, a question began surfacing about a possible weakness. It wasn’t derived from opposition research into some facet of her life. It had nothing to do with her policy ideas.
It was the question often asked of female candidates and rarely of men: Is she “likab
le” enough to be president? Others put it another, potentially more devastating, way: Is she too much like Hillary Clinton to be the nominee? …The website McSweeney’s covered the flap over Warren’s likability with a report whose headline, while satirical, made a pungent point: “I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary and Coincidentally I’m Starting to Hate Elizabeth Warren.”
For Democratic women running for president, it conjured what may be a preliminary contest in 2020: demonstrating they’re not Hillary Clinton — nothing like her! — before they earn the nod to take on President Trump.
James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal in a long Twitter thread took on specifically the Weigel/Linsky WaPo article and also more generally the notion that male candidates are not questioned as to likability.
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Taranto was not done. He went back and dug out old articles by Weigel questioning the likability of male candidates:
Let’s get back to Ted Cruz. His “likability” was repeatedly and obsessively a topic of discussion not only during the 2016 presidential primaries but also in his 2018 Senate contest. Last September, Jezebel ran an article, A Recent History of Ted Cruz Trying and Failing to Be Likable:
The notion that only female candidates are questioned about likability is a distortion and denial of history.
The real problem with questioning Elizabeth Warren’s likability is that she is not likable. If she were, liberals would be happy to talk about it.
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I remember Bill Bradley walking onto a late night TV show with a rubber chicken, pointing out in self deprecating fashion that he supposedly had no sense of humor.
He was trying to improve his likeability
The guy was a sitting senator who graduated from Princeton, and was an NBA All Star.
But he was not likeable enough.
Funny thing, he was a guy
Bradley was elected on two bases: He ran as a Democrat in NJ and he was a celebrity, probably more on the latter for his first election. His re-elections were based more on the former.
People who get emotional, raise their voices, and point fingers are simply indicating that their arguments are weak on facts and/or logic.
I find her likable, 1/1024th percent.
I have had dinner with Nancy Pelosi–she was not that likable. Her husband was much more friendly and struck me as the one who should have been a politician.
Pelosi??
Did you lose your appetite?
I would love to know more about that dinner.
It was no big deal–a long time ago. It was a dinner for about 10-15 people Rep. & Mr. Pelosi were hosting for one of their children. When we arrived at the restaurant, Mr. Pelosi was already there, being a great host, engaging everyone in conversation, and showing his appreciation for friendship with their child. Rep. Pelosi was running late from Capitol Hill, and when she finally arrived, I do not believe she said more than a few words the entire evening. Given her quiet demeanor at the time, I never would have foreseen the position of power she would attain later.
I guess claiming that criticism of Liawatha is “racist” isn’t getting traction, so they don’t have many options. “Sexist” is the obvious fallback; weak but it will have to do.
American politicians have always been good used-car salesman types, even before we had used cars. Clinton was a good example. Bill, not Hillary. Likeability is very handy for used-car salesmen and serial rapists. This has never been a great mystery, even if the Tcholakian/Donegan/Pittman axis missed it.
It’s hard to think of, say, Richard Nixon, as cold a fish as was ever dredged from the abyssal depths, as “likeable”. Then came 1968, and his brief appearance on Laugh-In.
I remember that: “Sock it to ME.”
She is not going to be the dem nominee, unfortunately.
I would love to have her run against Trump. She would fail miserably. I think Dems deep down know this. (The history of unlikable Massachusetts Dems like Dukakis, Tsongas, and Kerry as presidential candidates is instructive as well).
So, I guess in a sense, I like her – as a candidate that would lose. How about that?
(I think it’s the only thing about her I like)
Of the 3 Tsongas was in fact the most likable/relatable but it didn’t get him as far as the other 2.
I just cannot help myself. All this talk of likeable and unlikeable, it occurs to me that R-Rump aka Rags, could start a consulting business based on this topic. He could show politicians all the things they should not do, say or be 🙂
I happen to find Elizabeth Warren very likeable. But I happen to like Leftist clueless, stilted, arrogant, elitist buffoons with all the charm of a molting snake, because they are so fun to mock.
So if I am understanding them correctly, liberals want me to raise the question of Liawatha’s likability and her similarity to Shrillary every opportunity I get.
As Barack famously said, “Lizzie, you’re likeable enough!”
Why do the unlikable dem politicians think we prols will warm up to them if they use “…get me…” in a sentence? In this video, Fauxahontas says she’s going to “…get me a beer.” In 2004, John Kerry, in a hilarious licensing encounter, asks where he can “…get me a huntin’ license.”
I’d love to see a GOP ad that addresses this.
Elizabeth Warren is without a doubt a shrew, a harridan. She is the aunt, who at every family gathering, needs to help each and every person there identify their most glaring fault, and map a way to self-improvement. You need to lose a few pounds. Have you considering going to a gym? Why do you date losers? I thought you said you were going to quit smoking? None of these will be off in the corner, quiet like. No, as you reach for seconds of the pecan pie, she will remind you that you need to lose a few pounds and seconds of pie won’t help. God have mercy on her soul.
I can think of dozens of people I enjoyed having a drink with, really, really liked, and many were close friends – but I wouldn’t want to elect them dogcatcher. And I can think of many others for whom I would vote, but I wouldn’t drink with them if they were buying (well, maybe some if they were buying). Those are two entirely different categories of people.
Why is Fauxcahontas unlikeable? Because she’s a fraud, who got rich by making a mockery of another race. She STOLE the opportunity due to an American Indian.
She’s a lying sack of sh-t.
She’s bent on destroying our way of life, and making herself rich in the process.
She’s a fat POS.
So yes, she’s very much like hillary clinton.
Judging by her appearance on TV, I don’t believe she’s fat. Otherwise spot on.
She’s built like a punching dummy. Look below her waste – er, waist.
In Cambridge where I live we call her Granny Warren.
Leftist’s have no idea how little one cares for what they want,think or feel when it comes to a pair of Marxist Hags like Hillary and Fuaccahontas.
It’s a recycling of criticism of Obama is racist.
Fauxcahontas (Lieawatha if you wish) was covered this morning on some event in Iowa. I was sort of listening to the TV (looking at my monitor), and had to turn and look at the TV to see who was whining about (it was a list of things she believes “the people” want changed in the country). She can’t change her voice and she can’t change the person she is. She will never be President, but I’m quite happy to see her, and any number of other Socialist-Democrats campaigning for 2020. the more money they spend, the more they contribute to the President’s great economy.
Elizabeth warren was going to be on the next season of survivor. She had to leave the show when she couldn’t help but giggle whenever Jeff Probst uttered the line “The tribe has spoken”.
I really don’t care about likability. It is irrelevant. The MSM only talks about that kind of thing because they have contempt for ordinary voters, and like to pretend that ordinary voters are stupid enough to vote for people based on irrelevancies instead of policies. It’s how they explained John F’n Kerry’s loss to GWB (“they voted against their own self-interests”), although a Democrat admitted to me after the election, “we dodged a bullet with that one.”
That is also how they lost so much ground to DJT during the runup to the the 2016 election. They went all in with Hillary Clinton’s character assassination strategy, and the country voted for policies it wanted.
This is one sneaky redskin…
And a pathetic retail politician.
First Warren tried to gain an advantage over other candidates by falsely claiming to be a Native American. Now, she’s playing the gender card.
Anyone who watches the Senate on C-SPAN 2 knows Elizabeth Warren has no friends in the Senate. She walks in, votes, and leaves. None of the other Democrats goes up to talk to her. Usually, especially on the Republican side, you see those schmoozers talking in bunches all the time. It’s not about looks. Mitch McConnell is not blessed with good looks (to put it mildly), but he has plenty of friends in the Senate, and that’s part of why he’s effective.