“If Warren was a man, this would be over by now,” is a statement so painfully true that it became a cliché the moment it was first uttered. And yet it somehow failed to capture the scope of the unfairness that greeted Warren on the campaign trail — the way she was held to impossibly high standards, met them, and still saw male competitors who met much lower standards keep scaling past her in the polls.
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Americans apparently couldn’t see that she is a once-in-a-generation talent and reward her for it with the presidency. That is a shameful blight on us. She wrecked Bloomberg in the debate and, in the process, may well have spared us from seeing a presidential election purchased by a billionaire. We responded as we so often do for women who go above the call of duty: We thanked her for her service and promoted less qualified men above her.
This feels personal to women, and it should. The same forces that pushed Warren out of the race — such as asking her to do the work of figuring out how to finance Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan, and then criticizing her for it while he skated by on generalities — offer a microcosm of how we treat women generally, and the reasons why women work so hard both at home and on the job yet make less money.”
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