The Failing New York Times

With the collapse of the Warren campaign, both of the candidates the NYT endorsed are now out of the Democratic primary.

If Times readers still want to vote for a woman to run against Trump, it's ok: Tulsi Gabbard is still standing tall. She also won a delegate in American Samoa, so she might make the debate stage next time!

UPDATE: The Atlantic publishes a piece by Elaine Godfrey with five theories for Warren's fall. Sexism is theory number five.

Sexism in politics is like Whack-a-Mole, right? Every cycle, it shows up in a new way. We dealt with the “likability” issue [with Warren] pretty quickly. Now it’s “electability.” Every data point that we have says women can win—in 2018, women won all over the country—and yet we keep asking this question. The conversation becomes really problematic for a candidate who’s trying to make [the] case about what kind of agenda she wants to set, what kind of policies she wants to have.

The biggest issue this year is the double standard, where we hold women candidates to different standards than we hold the men. It’s very clear from the Medicare for All conversation that we expected and demanded more of [Warren] than we did the male candidates, and it hurt her. That was happening right as she was rising. As late as [last] week, Bernie Sanders [was] saying, I still can’t tell you every nickel and dime [about how to pay for his Medicare for All plan], and everybody’s like, All right. Well, you know, it’s about priorities. I’m not saying we should treat Bernie Sanders differently. I’m saying we should treat Elizabeth Warren the same.

She either outright won all [the debates] or performed really well. But you didn’t see wall-to-wall coverage the next day of what that would mean for her campaign and whether the momentum was going to come in. Where she had victories, they were not celebrated as loudly as the men[’s] were, and where she had defeats, it was seen as an inevitable character flaw as opposed to a bump in the road.

There were three tickets out of Iowa until a woman got the third one. I am very interested to see a deep dive into [news-coverage] quantity and quality once this is all over, and it’s pretty obvious that the women just didn’t get the same.

I cannot imagine that a deep dive into the news coverage the Warren campaign got will show that it was less than glowing. I mean, she was endorsed by the NYT! She was treated as brilliant and intellectual and the one candidate who really could formulate solutions to the nation's great problems by journalists from the left to what passes for the middle. Unlike Joe Biden, she had many passionate supporters including among journalists who provided in-kind donations with positive coverage. Joltin' Joe seems to have mostly machine support -- but having a machine behind you, whether the Clinton machine or Obama's Chicago machine, is the real route to power in the national-level Democratic party, and they're united behind Joe.

That said, I do think sexism played the crucial role in her downfall. Specifically, I think it was her campaign's collusion with CNN to forward an unsupported accusation of sexism against Bernie Sanders. Her numbers began to crash as people on the Left experienced the kind of astonishment that so many of us on the right experienced during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. They didn't notice then because they were prepared to believe any kind of slander against a right-leaning SCOTUS nominee, but this time they saw through to the nastiness, the dishonesty, and the unfairness of trying to destroy the career of a man they admired via accusations of sexism fielded without any evidence whatsoever.

The very people she needed to vote for her didn't believe her -- perhaps in part because she has a long legacy of proven false statements about her own biography -- and they couldn't believe she'd try to destroy the reputation of a man who -- by their lights -- has lived with moral clarity and distinction for many decades. Bernie was arrested with the civil rights marchers; Bernie was always on the forefront of every issue they cared about. He's been a loyal husband to a loyal wife, advanced the causes of many women in politics, and she was prepared to destroy him anyway in pursuit of power.

If that was their judgment, they were right to drive her out of the path of power. If they were right about her, she's the kind of person who shouldn't have power.

UPDATE: Jeff Jacoby points out that 76% of women in Massachusetts voted against Warren. Democratic women voters, even, as Mike D points out in the comments.