Jon Margolis is a political columnist for VTDigger.
In the continuing and perhaps never-ending squabble over what Sen. Bernie Sanders did or did not say to Sen. Elizabeth Warren one day in 2018, two of Vermont’s three most recent Democratic ex-governors covered themselves in anything but glory last week.
Both Peter Shumlin and Madeleine Kunin weighed in on Warren’s side, suggesting that she must be the one telling the truth because they never liked Sanders anyway.
Warren may well be telling the truth. But the longstanding antipathy between Sanders and Vermont’s Democratic hierarchy proves nothing.
Nor does anything they said. “What you’re seeing now,” said Shumlin in a story in Politico, “is…even if he considers you a friend, like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie will come first.”
As opposed to whom? To all those candidates who habitually defer to their rivals? You all remember the many times that Shumlin, governor from 2011 to 2017, made a point of not taking credit for an accomplishment.
Oh, or maybe you don’t.
As for Kunin, who was governor from 1985 to 1991, she said she believed Warren “since she’s been such a straight shooter on everything else.”
She has not. Even if one were to conclude (reasonably) that her adversaries have woefully overblown the importance of some of her misleading statements, claiming “my children went to public schools” when one of them did not is not being “a straight shooter.”
Nor was telling the Texas State Bar Association in 1986 that her race was “American Indian.”
But it’s an ill wind, as they say, and the ex-governors have performed a service by opening a window onto two political phenomena – an old one in Vermont and a new one nationally – that rarely get discussed.
Not that it’s exactly a secret, but Vermont Democrats try to avoid talking about the fact that they find Bernie Sanders and his supporters to be a big pain in the neck.
They also find the Progressive Party (founded by Sanders supporters) a big pain in the neck for the same reason, a reason Shumlin described.
“He (Sanders) and his team think they’re holier than the rest,” said the former governor.
Sanderistas and Progressives wouldn’t put it that way, of course. They’d say they are purer, less willing to compromise.
It’s the same thing. Progressives don’t have to compromise because they never won (and probably never will) the governorship or enough legislative seats to be able to govern. They are free merely to advocate. Advocating is easy. Governing is hard. It requires compromise.
That explains why to Vermont Democratic bigwigs – statewide elected officials, Democratic State Committee members and staff, county chairs – both the Progressive Party and Bernie Sanders and his devotees are annoying, if not infuriating. More infuriating because – Sanders being so popular – they are afraid to say so while they’re in office or running for it.
No longer in or running for office, Shumlin was free to vent. So was Kunin, whose antipathy toward Sanders stems (at least) from the time he ran against her as an independent when she sought re-election in 1986. She won and he came in a distant third. Still, incumbent office-holders resent third-party challengers who could drain away enough votes to tilt the race. It’s no surprise that she’s still miffed.
There’s another reason both Shumlin and Kunin are inclined to criticize Sanders, and this connects with what is going on in national politics. They both supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, and some Clinton loyalists blame Sanders for Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump.
They’re wrong. As the perceptive (and woman) columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in Sunday’s New York Times, Clinton lost “because she ran an entitled, joyless, nose-in-the-air campaign,” not because she was a woman.
Still, a small but noticeable trace of resentment and petulance between the Sanders and Clinton supporters of 2016 lingers on fringes of the Democratic primary electorate. That enmity re-emerged after Warren alleged and Sanders denied last Tuesday that he had told her that a woman could not be elected president.
While there are men and women on both sides of this spat, it has taken on an undeniably gender-oriented tenor. As soon as last Tuesday’s debate ended, some Sanders supporters – all of them apparently male – took to Twitter to assail Warren, often harshly, calling her a “fake” and a “dirty politician.” One of their hashtags was #NeverWarren. Another was #RefundWarren, urging donors to demand their money back.
By all appearances, these messages lacked the overt and sometimes vulgar misogyny of some of the “Bernie Bros” screeds of 2016. None of them came from the Sanders campaign itself. Still, they reflect this relatively new wrinkle in political life — aggravated if not created by social media — for one candidate’s supporters to launch unforgiving personal attacks on whoever gets in his or her way.
For its part, the pro-Warren (and mostly female) side did not respond in kind. Rather than attack Sanders, some complained that women in politics are held to a different standard. In Jezebel, which calls itself “a Supposedly Feminist Website,” writer Esther Wang talked of “an old and enduring truth that being labelled a ‘liar’ sticks far more often, and more destructively, to women.”
Perhaps it does. But that’s not an old and enduring truth. It’s a debatable proposition for which scant evidence was provided. A few weeks ago, when Warren was doing better in the polls but there was some talk about whether she was sufficiently “likeable,” commentators complained that this was a standard that applied only to women candidates.
Again, possibly so. Try telling it to Al Gore or Michael Dukakis.
Correction: This story initially incorrectly identified Kunin and Shumlin as Vermont’s last two Democratic governors. In fact, they are two of the three most recent Democratic governors.
