#MeToo provocation against Bernie Sanders
organized by CNN and Elizabeth Warren
By David Walsh
January 20, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
CNN and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from
Massachusetts, with powerful establishment support,
combined to stage a provocation this week aimed at
slowing down or derailing the campaign of Vermont
Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party
presidential nomination.
Through CNN, the
Massachusetts senator’s camp first alleged that
Sanders told her in December 2018 a woman could not
win a presidential election, an allegation Sanders
strenuously refuted. At the Democratic debate on
Tuesday night, CNN’s moderator acted as though the
claim was an indisputable reality, leading to a
post-debate encounter between Warren and Sanders,
which the network just happened to record and
circulate widely.
This is a political stink bomb, borrowed from the
#MeToo playbook, typical of American politics in its
putrefaction. Unsubstantiated allegations are turned
into “facts,” these “facts” become the basis for
blackening reputations and damaging careers and
shifting politics continuously to the right. Anyone
who denies the allegations is a “sexist” who refuses
“to believe women.”
The Democratic establishment is fearful of
Sanders, not so much for his nationalist-reformist
program and populist demagogy, but for what his
confused but growing support portends: the movement
to the left by wide layers of the American
population. The US ruling elite seems convinced,
like some wretched, self-deluded potentate of old,
that if it can simply stamp out the unpleasant
“noise,” the rising tide of disaffection will
dissipate.
CNN’s operation began Monday when it posted a
“bombshell” article by M.J. Lee with the headline,
“Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren in private
2018 meeting that a woman can’t win, sources say.”
The article animatedly begins, “The stakes were
high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met at
Warren’s apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in
December 2018.” Among other things, the CNN piece
reported, the pair “discussed how to best take on
President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main
reasons she believed she would be a strong
candidate: She could make a robust argument about
the economy and earn broad support from female
voters. Sanders responded that he did not believe a
woman could win.”
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
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Lee continues, “The description of that meeting
is based on the accounts of four people: two people
Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter,
and two people familiar with the meeting.” In
reality, the story is based on the account of
one individual with a considerable interest in
cutting into Sanders’ support, i.e., Elizabeth
Warren. As the New York Times primly noted,
“Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders were the only people in
the room.”
The absurd CNN article goes on, “After
publication of this story, Warren herself backed up
this account of the meeting, saying in part in a
statement Monday, ‘I thought a woman could win; he
disagreed.’” In other words, Warren “backed up” what
could only have been her own account
insofar as she was the only person there besides
Sanders!
After a pro forma insertion of Sanders’
categorical denial that he ever made such a
statement, in which he reasonably observed, “Do I
believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After
all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million
votes in 2016,” Lee plowed right ahead as though his
comments were not worth responding to. She carries
on, “The conversation also illustrates the
skepticism among not only American voters but also
senior Democratic officials that the country is
ready to elect a woman as president” and, further,
“The revelation that Sanders expressed skepticism
that Warren could win the presidency because she is
a woman is particularly noteworthy now, given that
Warren is the lone female candidate at the top of
the Democratic field.”
This is one of the ways in which the sexual
misconduct witch-hunt has poisoned American
politics, although by no means the only one.
Warren’s claims about a private encounter simply
“must be believed.”
During the Democratic candidates’ debate itself
Tuesday night, moderator Abby Phillips addressed
Sanders in the following manner: “Let’s now turn to
an issue that’s come up in the last 48 hours
[because Warren and CNN generated it]. Sen. Sanders,
CNN reported yesterday that—and Sen. Sanders, Sen.
Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you
told her that you did not believe that a woman could
win the election. Why did you say that? ”
(emphasis added).
Sanders denied once again that he had said any
such thing. Phillips persisted, “Sen. Sanders, I do
want to be clear here, you’re saying that you never
told Sen. Warren that a woman could not win the
election?” Sanders confirmed that. Insultingly,
Phillips immediately turned to Warren and continued,
“Sen. Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders
told you a woman could not win the election?” This
was all clearly prepared ahead of time, a deliberate
effort to embarrass Sanders and portray him as a
liar and a male chauvinist.
Following the debate, Warren had the audacity to
confront the Vermont senator, refuse to shake his
hand and assert, “I think you called me a liar on
national TV.” When Sanders seemed startled by her
remark, she repeated it. CNN managed to capture the
sound and preserve it for widespread distribution.
The WSWS gives no support to Sanders, a phony
“socialist” whose efforts are aimed at channeling
working-class anger at social inequality, poverty
and war back into the big business Democratic Party.
He is only the latest in a long line of figures in
American political history devoted to maintaining
the Democrats’ stranglehold over popular opposition
and blocking the development of a broad-based
socialist movement.
Nonetheless, the CNN-Warren “dirty tricks”
operation is an obvious hatchet job and an attack
from the right. Accordingly, the New York Times
and other major outlets have been gloating and
attempting to make something out of it since Tuesday
night. The obvious purpose is to “raise serious
questions” about Sanders and dampen support for him,
among women especially. It should be recalled that
in 2016 Sanders led Hillary Clinton among young
women by 30 percentage points.
Michelle Cottle, a member of the Times
editorial board (in “Why Questions on Women
Candidates Strike a Nerve,” January 15), asserted
that the issue raised by the Warren-Sanders clash
was “not about Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. Not
really. And Ms. Warren was right to try to shift the
focus to the bigger picture—even if some critics
will sneer that she’s playing ‘the gender card.’”
Cottle’s “bigger picture,” it turned out,
primarily involved smearing Sanders. The present
controversy, she went on, “has resurfaced some of
Mr. Sanders’s past women troubles. His 2016 campaign
faced multiple accusations of sexual harassment, pay
inequities and other gender-based mistreatment.
Asked early last year if he knew about the
complaints, Mr. Sanders’s reaction was both
defensive and dismissive: ‘I was a little bit busy
running around the country’.”
After Cottle attempted to convince her readers,
on the basis of dubious numbers, that Americans were
perhaps too backward to elect a female president,
she continued, again, taking as good coin Warren’s
allegations, “This less-than-inspiring data—along
with from-the-trail anecdotes about the gender-based
voter anxiety that Ms. Warren and Ms. [Amy]
Klobuchar have been facing—help explain why Mr.
Sanders’s alleged remarks struck such a nerve. Women
candidates and their supporters aren’t simply
outraged that he could be so wrong. They’re worried
that he might be right.” The remarks he denies
making have nonetheless “outraged” Cottle and
others.
The Times more and more openly expresses
fears about a possible Sanders’ nomination. Op-ed
columnist David Leonhardt headlined his January 14
piece, “President Bernie Sanders,” and commented,
“Sanders has a real shot of winning the Democratic
nomination. Only a couple of months after he
suffered a mild heart attack, that counts as a
surprise.” Leonhardt downplays Sanders’ socialist
credentials, observing that “while he [Sanders]
would probably fail to accomplish his grandest goals
(again, like Medicare for all), he would also move
the country in a positive direction. He might even
move it to closer to a center-left ideal than a more
moderate candidate like Biden would.”
On Thursday, right-wing Times columnist
David Brooks argued pathetically against the
existence of “class war” in “The Bernie Sanders
Fallacy.” He ridiculed what he described as “Bernie
Sanders’s class-war Theyism: The billionaires have
rigged the economy to benefit themselves and
impoverish everyone else.” According to Brooks,
Sanders is a Bolshevik who believes that “Capitalism
is a system of exploitation in which capitalist
power completely dominates worker power.” Accusing
Sanders of embracing such an ABC socialist
proposition is all nonsense, but it reveals
something about what keeps pundits like Brooks up at
night.
The Times is determined, as the WSWS has
noted more than once, to exclude anything from the
2020 election campaign that might arouse or
encourage the outrage of workers and young people.
The past year of global mass protest has only
deepened and strengthened that determination.
The Times, CNN and other elements of the
media and political establishment, and behind them
powerful financial-corporate interests, don’t want
Sanders and they don’t necessarily want Warren
either, who engaged in certain loose talk about
taxing the billionaires, before retreating in
fright. They want a campaign dominated by race,
gender and sexual orientation—not class and not
social inequality. The #MeToo-style attack on
Sanders reflects both the “style” and the right-wing
concerns of these social layers.
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