Sexist Double Standard: Elizabeth Warren Slides and Bernie Sanders Skates on Medicare for All

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Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren was knocked out of the lead because of her plan to pay for “Medicare for All,” yet Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders hasn’t even tried to offer a plan, and has sucked up the support she lost, a double standard that reeks of sexism.

Senator Warren was flying high in early October, when she briefly overtook former Vice President Joe Biden for the lead in the 2020 Democratic primary race, a lead Biden regained in short order. What followed was a polling slide that saw her support tumble from a high of 26 percent to its current level in the 14 percent range.

Sanders, meanwhile, has rebounded from a low of 14 percent following his heart attack to his current solid 20 percent second-place level.

The roots of this reversal of fortune are not difficult to divine. They first began to grow in September, when incessant demands for Warren to “admit” her health care plan would raise taxes on the middle class began to rise in temperature and pitch. At the time, Warren adopted a strategy of denying the soundbite while appearing to concede the point on her own terms, reframing the question as one of overall cost to the consumer.

It was a good strategy. Medicare for All is a bad plan, but Warren had a good strategy to deal with this question. Sanders’ strategy was to admit taxes would go up for middle class people, but falsely claim that costs would go down overall, delivering the politically damaging soundbite while not substantiating his false claim.

But then, prior to the October debate, pressure began to mount for Warren to come up with an answer to the question that Bernie Sanders wasn’t even trying to answer. That pressure mounted at the debate when Warren was attacked over the issue by then-South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who even pitted Warren against Sanders by saying “At least Bernie’s honest here and saying how he’s going to pay for this.”

Again, Sanders had acknowledged taxes would have to go up, but he has not put forward a specific plan on how to pay for his Medicare for All plan — just some “options.”

Following the debate, Warren was grilled mercilessly, as CNN pundits spent a solid 1o minutes trying to get her to say taxes would go up for middle class people. And this is important for later, Warren also promised that Sanders’ Medicare for All plan would be the one she’d implement if elected president.

The din for Warren to release a specific funding plan increased, as did attacks from her rivals, and she and her campaign began working frantically to formulate one as her support dipped.

Actually, she released two plans. The first one was about how to fund the $52 trillion in spending that it would take to implement Medicare for All. It did not go over well, and it forced her to promise another plan that would, among other things, address the 2 million jobs that would be lost due to her first plan.

Then came the second plan, which was essentially to enact a juiced-up version of the Biden-Buttigieg plans, then see if Americans liked it enough to support Medicare for All. That was exactly the argument that Buttigieg had been making for months while Warren attacked him as a sellout.

So yes, Warren put out two very bad plans, and her slide in the polls tracks closely with those debacles. But Bernie Sanders was rewarded with a significant chunk of the support that Warren lost because he did not put out a specific plan to pay for his proposal, and nobody pressured him to.

In fact, in a recent interview, Sanders refused to give a price tag for his plan, after he had already given that same reporter a specific price tag months earlier. That reporter — The Washington Post‘s Robert Costa — not only failed to call Sanders out, he falsely wrote that “Sanders has declined to specify how much it would cost to implement his Medicare-for-all plan.”

I think it would be fair to observe that I’m not exactly high on Warren’s candidacy. At the start of this election cycle, she was among my top candidates, despite her repeated insistence that the 2016 primary was “rigged” for Hillary Clinton, and despite my reservations about her past decades as a Republican. People (mostly white people) like to shrug that off, but Warren always chalks up her conversion to “the banks” and never explains — or is asked to explain — how she ignored all the racism and misogyny and homophobia for all those years.

And for years, I excused her claims of Native American heritage because her opponents were being so racist about it, and I did not fully understand the harm it caused, and what it said about her character. I learned that Warren went to a high school that banned black students in a district that began integrating in 1955, which she obviously had little or no control over, but which she has never spoken publicly about, which is within her control.

She earned a full scholarship while black children who lived in her school district were forced to transfer to other schools. The story Warren tells at every rally, about her mother putting on “the dress” to go get a job at Sears, is about Warren’s mom making that sacrifice specifically to keep her in that school district. Seems worth a mention.

Luckily for Warren, the predominantly white media will never press her on those issues, but unfortunately, they are so ignorant about health care that they don’t know her new plan — not the funding one, the second plan — is better than Bernie’s.

In fact, I bet nobody who migrated from Warren to another candidate these past few months — mostly to Bernie by the look of it — can actually tell you why her plan is better or worse, or even what it is. Warren was sunk by the noise.

And lest you think this is just a one-off, remember that the same thing happened to Senator Kamala Harris. Like Warren would later do, Harris listened to people’s concerns about Medicare for All, came out with a plan that addressed those concerns, and was attacked for it.

Sexism is real, I hear it in every smug dismissal of Amy Klobuchar, I see it in the way tough and heavily-qualified Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was run out of this race because of Al Franken, and yes, I see it in the way Bernie Sanders skates while Elizabeth Warren gets raked over the coals over the exact same issue.

But Kamala Harris had to endure the double-edged sword of a sexist double standard as well as a racist one, some of it at Warren’s own hand. While Warren was lauded for taking on a social media giant, Harris was laughed at — by Warren and others — for taking a stand against racist incitement. Harris was grilled at an LGBTQ forum by a moderator who then let Warren off the hook for an anti-trans statement she’d made in the past.

And when Harris took principled stands on a number of occasions — like when she forced an HBCU forum to drop a sponsor who had given an award to Trump — she was accused of pulling a “stunt” and had her intelligence questioned by men.

Now, Warren is campaigning on Harris’ exit from the race, chalking it up not to the racist and sexist double standards that Senator Harris faced, but to billionaires.

Here’s the thing about double standards, though: it can be genuinely hard to know when you’re applying one. I’m constantly asking myself if I would apply the same standard to a male candidate, and I confidently answer that I already have — to Bernie Sanders a lot, but also to any candidate who is involved in issues that animate me. And Ronald Reagan.

But I would never fault anyone for asking the question, and I never stop asking it of myself. It’s time that people in the media and voters who fled Warren ask themselves why they’re punishing her for coming up with two plans, while rewarding Bernie Sanders for not even trying to come up with one.

And maybe it’s too late to make a difference, but those same people — and Warren — should also ask themselves why they treated Kamala Harris so poorly, and do better.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.