Joe Biden is about to pick his vice presidential running mate. Will American media mess it up?
California Sen. Kamala Harris. Could she be the Democratic vice presidential candidate? (Toni Sandys/The Washington Post via AP, Pool)
“Are you ready?”
That’s what Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Sunday when asked by a reporter if he had made his selection for a vice presidential running mate.
So who’s it going to be? Kamala Harris? Elizabeth Warren? Susan Rice? Tammy Duckworth? Karen Bass? Gretchen Whitmer?
We should find out any minute now, but on Sunday, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver said, “I’m not really making predictions here, but I suppose I buy the conventional wisdom here that Harris is the favorite.”
In his segment on ABC’s “This Week,” Silver laid out that conventional wisdom. He explained that it remains a “guessing game,” but here’s what the past has shown:
Of the 28 people nominated to be vice president on a major party ticket since World War II, 20 — or about 70% — were senators or governors. Of those 28, 13 would later go on to run for president. And of those people who actually became vice president, 75% went on to run for president, including Biden.
Which brings up a misogynistic slant in the commentary, particularly when it comes to Harris. The California senator has been criticized for being “too ambitious.” (Harris even addressed this topic recently, as reported in this New York Times article.) Yet, as Silver points out, history has shown that vice presidents often go on to run for president, and no one calls them (all men) “too ambitious.”
“When I hear anonymous advisers complain that Harris is too ambitious,” Silver said, “that really doesn’t ring true as a reason to keep her off the ticket. The VP is often a stepping stone to presidential aspirations.”
Whoever it is, assuming it is a woman, the candidate is going face attacks that a man would not. Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty recently warned the potential candidate to “get ready for an onslaught of online misogyny unlike you’ve ever seen.”
For example, Tumulty points to data that showed how Twitter reacted in the early stages of the Democratic presidential campaign. The results were that Harris, Warren and Amy Klobuchar “faced more attacks than their male competitors from right-wing and fake-news sites between December 2018 and April 2019.”
And it wasn’t just the quantity of attacks, but the kinds of attacks. While male candidates such as Biden, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg were questioned about their actual qualifications and policies, the female candidates were criticized for their personalities and, in the case of Klobuchar, about whether or not she was mean to staffers.
Another Washington Post column — this one from columnist Monica Hesse — had this headline: “Brace Yourself: America Is About To Act Really Awkward About Biden’s Female VP Pick.”
Hesse wrote, “It’s wonderful that Biden has decided to nominate a woman, but by vaguely publicizing gender as his main qualifier, he’s preemptively set his candidate up for pushback. Any time she falters, there will be murmurings of, ‘Well, Biden really wanted a woman.’ As if there was a better gender-blind (male) candidate out there who wouldn’t have faltered at all.”
What it all means
Undoubtedly, the fact that Biden’s VP pick is a woman WILL be a topic for much of the media in the weeks to come. And, yes, there will be misogynistic comments, most likely from right-wing or conservative media wanting Trump to be reelected. The challenge for the rest of the media is to not repeat the misguided coverage even if it is to shoot it down or point out its chauvinism. Better to ignore it and address only the topics that genuinely scrutinize the candidate’s worthiness for the job.
Best response
Hillary Clinton. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd was trying to make a point about how it has been 36 years since a man running for president as a Democrat chose a woman as his running mate. But she bungled it, originally writing that it has been 36 years since a man and woman had been on the Democratic ticket together. Of course it has only been four years since Hillary Clinton ran for president with Tim Kaine as her running mate.
The Times ran a correction and the column was fixed, but that didn’t stop Clinton from taking a fun jab at Dowd with this tweet:
“Either @TimKaine and I had a very vivid shared hallucination four years ago or Maureen had too much pot brownie before writing her column again.”
One other thought: The gist of Dowd’s column was about Geraldine Ferraro’s experience in 1984 as Walter Mondale’s running mate, and what Joe Biden’s vice presidential candidate might face this time around. But Dowd did leave out one other thing. Yes, she was writing about Democrats, but somewhere she should have at least acknowledged that Sarah Palin was the Republican running mate of John McCain in 2008.
|
