DES MOINES — The sudden clash between Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders over gender and honesty injected new uncertainty into the Democratic presidential race, after the broadcast on Wednesday evening of a recording that showed Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders trading accusations that each had called the other a “liar.”
With less than three weeks before the first-in-the-nation caucuses in Iowa, the breakdown of a longstanding nonaggression pact between the two leading liberals in the race cast doubt on whether Mr. Sanders, of Vermont, or Ms. Warren, of Massachusetts, can unite the Democratic Party’s liberal wing.
Polls in Iowa and New Hampshire have found all of the top candidates — Mr. Sanders, Ms. Warren, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — bunched up in the earliest Democratic contests, though Mr. Biden has held a steady national lead, helped to a great degree by divisions on the left.
The rupture, which has already angered supporters of both Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders, could heighten Democratic anxieties and inject negativity into the race in Iowa, where Democrats had a history of rewarding positive behavior from presidential candidates.
“I think you called me a liar on national TV,” Ms. Warren told Mr. Sanders after the presidential debate in Des Moines on Tuesday night, referring to their earlier dispute onstage over whether he told her in a private 2018 meeting that a woman could not be president. The New York Times described details of their exchange on Wednesday afternoon, and CNN broadcast an audio recording that night.
According to the audio, Mr. Sanders responded, “What?”
“I think you called me a liar on national TV,” she said again.
“You know, let’s not do it right now,” he said. “If you want to have that discussion, we’ll have that discussion.”
Ms. Warren replied, “Anytime.”
“You called me a liar,” Mr. Sanders said. “You told me — all right, let’s not do it now.”
Tom Steyer, the billionaire businessman, approached Mr. Sanders in the middle of the exchange.
“I don’t want to get in the middle,” Mr. Steyer said. “I just want to say, ‘Hi, Bernie.’”
Both the Warren and Sanders campaigns declined to comment on Wednesday.
The exchange onstage between the two progressives, surrounded by onlookers but wrapped up in their intensely personal rivalry, marked their most direct confrontation in the entire 2020 election. And in some respects, it represented a kind of inevitable concession to reality: If Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders share an ideological cause, up to a point, they cannot ultimately share a presidential nomination. For Ms. Warren, taking on Mr. Sanders face-to-face risked further angering the far left, sections of which have already turned on her for the rivalry with Mr. Sanders. And while Ms. Warren was praised for addressing the subject of gender head-on during the debate, even some of her supporters acknowledge that tackling sexism so prominently could risk leaving primary voters uneasy about the implications of nominating a woman.
Progressives fear the public division will benefit the moderates in the race — and, more broadly, threaten the movement they have tried to build. Leading progressive groups spent hours Wednesday trying to craft joint statements of unity while their leading political figures were in a public fight.
“I am hoping that volunteers and grass-roots groups can help bridge the gap that has opened between Warren and Sanders around their 2018 conversation,” said Larry Cohen, a longtime friend and adviser to Mr. Sanders who serves as chairman of Our Revolution, the organization that spun out of the 2016 Sanders presidential campaign. “We remain focused on racial and gender justice, health care, climate crisis, good jobs, student debt and free college, the spiraling military budget and more. I don’t see a path forward on those issues in the Senate or at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee without cooperation when the time comes.”
Many progressive leaders pointed to the 2004 primary as a cautionary tale, when feuding between the more liberal candidacies of Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont helped the more moderate Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts win the Iowa caucus after a summer slump.
“It’s absolutely critical that progressives focus their fire on the corporate wing of the party to not allow a repeat of the 2004 election,” said Neil Sroka, communications director for Democracy for America, a liberal group founded by Mr. Dean after his unsuccessful primary run.
For Mr. Sanders, there is little upside to a drawn-out clash with Ms. Warren, particularly over matters of gender and sexism. While Mr. Sanders’s hard-core base has rallied to his side, much of the Democratic electorate still harbors feelings of resentment toward Mr. Sanders for his conduct toward Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential primaries.
And in a conflict heavily focused on which candidate is telling the truth, Ms. Warren faces a real risk: Several studies have shown that voters punish women more harshly than men for real or perceived dishonesty.
Depictions of female candidates as calculating or conniving are political mainstays. As long ago as 1984, opponents launched “authenticity” attacks against Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to appear on a major party’s presidential ticket. This pattern endures regardless of who is telling the truth, these studies conclude, and regardless of either candidate’s intentions. If voters conclude that Ms. Warren is lying, it is most likely to hurt her more than it will hurt Mr. Sanders if voters conclude that he is lying.
It is unclear whether either candidate may be inclined to perpetuate the feud in public. It is telling that Ms. Warren’s most pointed comment to Mr. Sanders came after the formal debate concluded, and that Mr. Sanders responded not by escalating the fight but by deferring it to another time.
By the time CNN aired the footage on Wednesday night, the two candidates had not spoken about the exchange, people familiar with their whereabouts said, though they were expected to be in close contact when the Senate convenes Friday.
CNN executives initially said they did not believe the exchange had been captured by the network’s microphones. The network said its journalists located a recording late on Wednesday after reviewing audio from the microphones that Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren had been wearing onstage.
Over the weekend, Ms. Warren said she was “disappointed” in Mr. Sanders after Politico reported that his campaign had distributed a script to volunteers suggesting she appealed mainly to highly educated voters. On Monday, CNN reported that Mr. Sanders had told Ms. Warren in a private meeting in 2018 that he thought a woman could not win the presidency; Mr. Sanders vehemently denied it.
“I thought a woman could win; he disagreed,” Ms. Warren said in a statement on Monday.
On Tuesday, the issue burst forth onto the debate stage in a remarkable moment before a national audience that captured the recent friction between the two senators.
“I didn’t say it,” Mr. Sanders insisted, about her characterization of his 2018 remarks. Ms. Warren disputed that, then called him her friend before pivoting to make the case that of the six candidates onstage, only the women had won all of their elections.
After the debate, Mr. Steyer repeatedly insisted that he did not hear the back-and-forth between the two liberals.
“I was just saying good night to the two of them,” he told reporters during a brief exchange in the debate spin room at Drake University. “I didn’t hear anything.”
Reid J. Epstein and Sydney Ember reported from Des Moines, and Alexander Burns from New York. Reporting was contributed by Michael M. Grynbaum, Maggie Astor and Astead W. Herndon from New York, and Lisa Lerer from Washington.
"TV" - Google News
January 16, 2020 at 02:10AM
https://ift.tt/2uTMnvx
Warren Told Sanders After Debate, ‘I Think You Called Me a Liar on National TV’ - The New York Times
"TV" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2T73uUP
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Warren Told Sanders After Debate, ‘I Think You Called Me a Liar on National TV’ - The New York Times"
Post a Comment