Struggling 2020 Democrat Plays Gender Card To Explain Troubles
New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand currently sits at 0.8 percent in the current RealClearPolitics polling average, a scant 39.2 points behind pacesetter Joe Biden. In other words, to quote Jim Carrey in “Dumb and Dumber”: “You’re saying there’s a chance.”
Her numbers are down slightly from the early part of the campaign, when she was well on her way to the Oval Office with a jaunty 2.0 percent average. At least she’s not still lagging behind bizarre entrepreneur Andrew Yang, whose campaign has attracted attention because of the peculiar alt-right element that’s coalesced around it, or the fact that the candidate felt the need to publicly state he opposed circumcision. I guess there’s that.
So, the only reason why Gillibrand is polling in double digits is because you can’t express a number below one without a decimal point. Why is that? (Regarding her poll numbers, I mean; I’ll leave whether the decimal point was the most elegant way of arranging things to proponents of John Napier, its creator.)
Well, one could postulate it was that she was a protégé of Hillary Clinton’s in a year when the Clinton model of doing business isn’t so popular among Democrats. One could also note the protégé threw Hillary under every bus in Port Authority during the acme of the #MeToo movement, becoming one of the first major Democrats to say that Bill Clinton should have resigned for his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
In other words, Gillibrand probably oughtn’t be looking for support from anyone who feels strongly one way or the other about the issue. This actually isn’t an uncommon problem for Gillibrand, who had to explain how she never said she wanted to abolish ICE after she said she wanted to abolish ICE.
Beyond all that, there’s the fact that Gillibrand is the kind of president you get on a low-budget FX series where the commander in chief is a woman but also plays a small role so they need someone who’ll work for scale. She is a political void.
You could hear her give a stump speech, and 10 minutes later you couldn’t identify a single talking point or even pick her out of a lineup. She has no fresh ideas. She has no ideas that haven’t been articulated by another Democrat candidate at least six times before midday. That’s why her poll numbers are so low.
Or, it could be just because you’re a bloody sexist.
I actually feel sympathy for the people who have to file campaign puff-pieces for CNN. Read the first few paragraphs of “Kirsten Gillibrand is campaigning by living her best life. So why aren’t voters responding?” by Dan Merica — a chronicle of her time campaigning in New Hampshire — and tell me that you don’t know whether to be embarrassed for Merica, for Gillibrand or for both.
“It’s 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is wide awake and visibly pumped that The Killers is blaring in an exposed brick cycling studio here in downtown Manchester,” Merica writes. “Surrounded by six of her aides in what has become a campaign trail ritual, the New York Democrat bops in and out of the saddle as Rag’n’Bone Man’s ‘Human’ and Cold War Kids’ ‘First’ thumps out of the speakers.
“‘You don’t really come here to be comfortable,’ shouts another Kirstin, the instructor here at FortCycle. ‘I don’t even know how we keep going!'”
I don’t know how you do with that playlist, either. This sounds like a candidate who considers The Cure “too indie” for her tastes. And remember how we used to rag on Hillary Clinton’s bibulousness on the campaign trail? I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I want that back.
But then, Pitchforkisms aren’t what we’re here for. Merica points out that while “[i]t doesn’t take long on the campaign trail to see that Kirsten Gillibrand is having a great time,” voters aren’t responding. There’s a lot of talk about something like “the joyful campaign,” which sounds suspiciously like Hubert Humphrey’s “politics of joy” (which still didn’t get him in the White House, but I digress).
Why won’t this resonate? You can probably take a wild guess at Gillibrand’s wild guess, which she let on to Merica after a campaign event in the New Hampshire hamlet of Derry.
“Gillibrand, in an interview after the event, let out a hearty ‘Yeah’ when asked if she felt she was currently being underestimated in the race for the Democratic nomination.
“I think it’s just gender bias. I think people are generally biased against women. I think also biased against young women,” she told Merica. “There’s just bias and it’s real and it exists, but you have to overcome it.”
And that’s why she’s letting everyone know the real Kirsten Gillibrand, who drinks smoothies after cycle sessions where she sweats it out to (ugh) Cold War Kids.
“Voters will give a woman a shot. They just have to get to know her,” Gillibrand said. “They might make a judgment without knowing her, but once they meet her and know who she is and why she’s running, it will give her that opportunity. If I’m going to be the candidate of the women’s vote, which I fully intend to be, those voters might not come home until October or November or December.”
Putting emojis into stories is bad form when it comes to journalism, right? Because I really can’t think of any other proper rejoinder to all of that palaver other than putting the facepalm emoji where the last two sentences have been and moving right along.
The reason that Kirsten Gillibrand is sitting at 0.8 percent is that nobody Kirsten Gillibrand is paying to advise her has advised her that she’s Kirsten Gillibrand: That is, she’s an irresolute junior senator from New York who’s running on personality when that tank’s been empty since the moment she entered politics. She’s neither moderate liberal nor firebrand leftist, neither Washington insider nor dissident maverick. She has no new positions and no interesting backstory.
Merica’s piece contends Gillibrand is the kind of person who’s running on the idea of having fun but thinks that cycling at 6:45 a.m. is some kind of hedonic rush. She’s the sort of candidate who loves telling anecdotes to potential supporters who likely realize the painful truth she doesn’t:
No one wants to hear those anecdotes, which have been told a million different times in slightly different ways. She is every failed presidential candidate who has trod that familiar path through the Granite State, convinced he or she had something to offer America that simply wasn’t there.
But no. You’re not behind Kirsten Gillibrand because you’re a sexist, the same way the Democrats were sexist when they nominated Hillary Clinton last time (don’t think about it too hard; Gillibrand didn’t either). It takes you a while to give a woman a shot. You just have to get to know her. Have fun trying to pick her out of the audience, though, because if you’re over the age of 35 you’ve seen the better part of a hundred candidates just as prosaic and uninspired and unready as she is.
In that respect, maybe her membership among the distaff gender will help her. Most of those other mediocrities were men, after all.
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