Friday February 28, 2020; 4:47 PM EST
- This came up in a Twitter conversation with Miguel de Icaza, earlier today, mentioned above. I said that Sanders and Warren freak me out. Warren is his candidate, so he asked why. I said I didn't want to discuss it on Twitter. After giving it a few hours thought I decided to try it on my blog, here, now. #
As a man when I see another man cornered, in public, on a #metoo issue, I know that he has very little room to respond. There isn't much you can say. And it is almost as uncomfortable for other men watching it. When men get together in a #metoo charged environment, we talk with each other about how scared we are that we will be wrongly accused, precisely because there is nothing you can do or say. The classic example is Al Franken. It came out later, as was pretty obvious to me at the time, that the woman he supposedly abused was part of the play. Franken is a genuinely good person, and if he can be taken down by this, so easily, without any process, anyone can. #- If you think about it, Warren and her team had a problem to solve after a previous debate where she was almost silent. She needed to make a splash in this debate. They probably had a list of options, probably even focus group tested them, to see which would get the most attention, and she almost certainly planned and rehearsed how she would do it, and how she would react to various Bloomberg responses. That's #metoo being used as a political tool. Very calculating. And it worked, how well it worked, we'll find out on Tuesday. #
- But there's a third paragraph to this. It's true that men can't respond in public, but we can express our anger privately -- with our vote. I can vote for anyone I like. And in my gut I believe this is why Democrats do poorly with men. Democrats push this button too easily. Watching Bloomberg on stage, taking it, with no way to respond that preserves his dignity, that makes me angry. For me, it isn't enough to cause me to vote against the Democratic candidate, even if it was Warren. But I believe we lose because many men are justifiably angry at the Democrats and can't express that anger publicly. So they do it privately, by voting for Republicans.#
- PS: Here's a Google search for Elizabeth Warren on my blog, so you can see how I've written about her in the past. #