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Elizabeth Warren Called Out Mike Bloomberg's Treatment of Women at the Latest Democratic Debate


Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) came out hot for the latest Democratic debate, held on February 19 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her first target? Billionaire and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, who took the debate stage for the first time since entering the 2020 presidential race.

Warren set the tone within the debate’s first minutes, comparing Bloomberg to Donald Trump. “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians.’ And, no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg,” Warren said. “Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and ‘stop and frisk.'”

Bloomberg’s controversial “stop and frisk” policy, which disproportionately targeted black and Latino New Yorkers and was ruled unconstitutional, was a major subject of conversation last night, with Warren adding, “When the mayor says that he apologized, listen very closely to the apology. The language he used is about ‘stop and frisk.’ It’s about how it turned out. No, this isn’t about how it turned out. This is about what it was designed to do to begin with.”

Warren also took Bloomberg to task over allegations within his company of sexual misconduct and gender discrimination against women. Bloomberg tried to highlight women he’s promoted and supported over the years, but Warren wasn’t having it. “I hope you heard what his defense was—’I’ve been nice to some women. That just doesn’t cut it,” she said. She further called on Bloomberg to release women from the the NDAs they’d signed at his company so that the country could hear their stories. “We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many nondisclosure agreements and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against,” Warren continued.

Twitter was buzzing over Warren’s fiery performance. “I don’t know why you guys are surprised. Elizabeth Warren has been taking down rich guys trying to run a grift on you her whole career,” Ashley Nicole Black tweeted. “This is what she was made for. This is just a taste of how she’s going to handle Trump.”

And it would appear that it wasn’t just lip service on social media—the Warren campaign announced they raised $2.8 million last night, the best 24-hour period of fundraising ever.

The next Democratic debate will take place on February 25 in Charleston, South Carolina.



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For Latinas, the Super Bowl 2020 Was A Night Of Triumph—And Debate


But for Veralucia Mendoza, a 26-year-old university employee in Toledo, who is Afro-Latina and was formerly an undocumented immigrant, the supposed show of representation was a let down.

“I’m disappointed that Latinxs choose to ignore the call for boycotts by Black activists,” she says, pointing out that the show didn’t include a single Afro-Latinx performer. (Adams, who opened the game, isn’t Latina.) “Some of the worst colorism I’ve ever faced was back in South America, in my home country,” Mendoza says. She’s part of Mijente, a group that bills itself as “a political home for Latinx and Chicanx organizing,” and shared thoughtful criticism throughout the show. “I don’t know what Latinx pride means without collective liberation and solidarity across the board,” Mendoza says. “If that’s the price to pay for Latinx representation, then I don’t want it. I don’t want a white-washed version of us.” She chose not to watch the show in protest.

Luz Chavez, a 42-year-old Latina from Chicago, pointed out that critics like Mendoza aren’t being demanding—they’re just calling for authentic advocacy. Solidarity, in addition to sequins. “What kind of Latina you wanna be this year?” she asks. “One like Cardi B, who refused to perform for the Super Bowl halftime show in solidarity with Kaepernick and Black communities? Or one like J.Lo and Shakira?” She goes on, “The halftime show was being touted as ‘the most Hispanic Super Bowl ever.’ This was a moment powerhouse Latinxs had the world in their hands and the power to flip the script and show Black-Latinx solidarity, which would have been earth-shattering to Trump and his white supremacist base.”

But Carla Gonzalez, a 36-year-old in Phoenix, loved the halftime show. “I liked J.Lo’s attempt to bring a political message with the cages and the children,” she says, praising both women’s performances. But she adds, “I believe Black Lives Matter, and I think that they could have done a bigger push of bringing that narrative into their performance and exemplify Black and Brown solidarity.” Melissa Carmona, a 28-year-old Colombian-American mental health counselor who goes by “The Spanglish Therapist” on Instagram, wrote “part of what impacted the way I saw myself when I moved to the US was not seeing and hearing more people like me be represented on TV in ways that did not involve drugs (among many other stereotypes).” Seeing the women perform, as well as J. Balvin, whom she pointed out has been open about his mental health struggles, was “freakin’ cool.” The complexity of the performance is leading to “great and important conversations,” she says.





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Kamala Harris Won't Be on Tonight's Debate Stage. No Matter Who Your Candidate Is, That Should Matter to You


To recap: While billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who entered the race in November, will be able to self-fund his new campaign, Castro has not been on the debate stage in months. Booker failed to clear the barrier for tonight’s event. Neither of the men, both non-white, have been able to raise enough money or garner enough support to make the cut. Gillibrand, like Harris, ended her campaign because she didn’t see a path to remain in the race. And over the past few months, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has suffered in the polls, even after a significant rise over the summer. Each week, it seems, there’s some new speculation on whether or not her affect and approach will make her too unlikeable and unelectable for voters to support.

As critics have pointed out, those stories are published in the same publications that often lavish coverage on white men who remain in the race. (In April, media outlets gushed over Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s ability to speak Norwegian while seemingly ignoring Gillibrand’s complete fluency in Mandarin. And much has been made of the fact that Buttigieg was a Rhodes scholar, though far fewer have noted that Booker was too.)

Harris and Gillibrand both brought up issues, in their campaigning and during debates, that are less likely to be discussed in detail in their absence. Both women were unapologetic in their support of women’s reproductive freedom, for example, and both, in their advocacy, highlighted the relationship between systemic racism and sexism. Booker and Castro, who remain in the race but will not be on the debate stage, have also demonstrated a willingness to discuss women’s rights and how those issues are related to other concerns, such as immigration, mass incarceration, and gun violence.

During the first Democratic debate in June, for example, both Harris and Booker took former Vice President Joe Biden to task over his history of opposing school busing. Harris took the lead in the confrontation, referencing her own childhood experiences with segregation. Her direct approach, as well as her ability to draw on a personal narrative, won the night. After the debate, her poll numbers moved into double digits for the first and ultimately only time.



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Four Seasoned Journalists Will Moderate Tonight's Presidential Debate. They Happen to Be Women.


The four jouranlists are some of the most practiced reporters and commentators on television. Between them, Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell, Ashley Parker, and Kristen Welker have covered Congress, the White House, presidential races, and the State Department. (Mitchell has herself reported on all four of those beats.) Each is so seasoned she seems to have eliminated verbal tics from her speech—the “ums” and “likes” that mere mortals can’t shake.

But in conversation with them, there are phrases that crop up like punctuation.

It’s the first week of November and the fifth presidential debate set to take place in Atlanta, Georgia, is imminent, hosted on MSNBC with the Washington Post. Late last month, the network announced its four moderators—Maddow, who hosts her namesake show on the network; Mitchell, a veteran with the network since 1978; Parker, a White House reporter for the Washington Post; and NBC News White House correspondent Welker.

Rachel Maddow on Today.

Lloyd Bishop/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images

Andrea Mitchell

Andrea Mitchell on Meet the Press.

NBC NewsWire/Getty Images

The top brass went with their finest, of course—a balance of expertise, from Maddow, with her finger on the pulse of Democratic voters, to Mitchell, who is the chief NBC News foreign affairs correspondent, to Parker and Welker, who report on this particular White House on a minute-to-minute basis. (“I’ve got four of the best journalists ever,” explains Rashida Jones, senior vice president for specials on NBC News and MSNBC. “Andrea and Kristen and Rachel and Ashley—they know how to interview people.”)

And oh, sure. That’s right. All are women.

As Mitchell, Welker, and Parker tell it when we meet at 30 Rockefeller Center in a snug, bright conference room, these three in particular also happen to be friends, with Parker and Welker spending hours racing between their offices and the White House and both appearing on Mitchell’s show, Andrea Mitchell Reports.

And so when the women talk, these are the words that get repeated over and over. Not “uh” or “well,” but: “To Ashley’s point,” “As Kristen said,” “Let me just add about these two,” “I agree with Andrea,” and “No, please. You first.”

What’s it like to be in a room or at a table or on camera with four of the most accomplished women in journalism? Well, there’s a lot of credit to spread around, bottomless praise, and no one interrupts.

Pressed to describe her relationship with her female coworkers, Mitchell observes that the group “tends to be more collegial.” Later, she adds: “I don’t want to be sexist, but there is a different feeling in the room when we’re preparing.”



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Kamala Harris Takes a Stand for Women's Reproductive Rights at the Democratic Debate


At the end of the last debate in September, Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) tweeted: “The #DemDebate was three hours long and not one question about abortion or reproductive rights.”

She wasn’t about to let that happen again. At the CNN/New York Times debate, Harris didn’t wait for moderators to raise the issue of attacks on women’s reproductive freedom. When asked to respond to points other candidates had just made about health care, she pivoted. Harris noted that “not one word” about abortion had been said in previous debates, even as state legislatures continue to pursue an agenda that will make women’s health care harder to access and abortion available to fewer and fewer people.

“There are states that have passed laws that will virtually prevent women from having access to reproductive healthcare,” Harris said, to cheers. “And it is not an exaggeration to say women will die. Poor women, women of color will die because these Republican legislatures in these various states who are out of touch with America are telling women what to do with their bodies.”

To raucous applause, she added: “People need to keep their hands off of women’s bodies and let women make the decisions about their own lives.”

But it wasn’t just the audience that celebrated Harris’s sense of urgency. Up on stage, Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) applauded her, too. “God bless Kamala,” he said. “But you know what? Women should not be the only ones taking up this cause and this fight. It is not just because women are our voters and our friends and our wives. It’s because women are people and people deserve to control their own body.”

It shouldn’t come as such a surprise to hear presidential candidates talk about a basic, safe health care procedure—that is, abortion. It shouldn’t be a shock to hear a man defend a woman’s right to choose. When it comes to Roe v. Wade and health care access, most Americans don’t want to go back. But in our current political climate and with conservatives determined to overturn that landmark Supreme Court decision, we can’t take stands like the ones Harris and Booker made for granted.

Viewers seemed to feel the same. Social media exploded in gratitude to the candidates for their support of this essential aspect of women’s health, which, to Booker’s point, doesn’t just affect women and shouldn’t be framed as a “women’s issue.” Women are 51 percent of the population. It shouldn’t take three and a quarter debates to remind people of that inexorable fact.

Mattie Kahn is Glamour’s* senior culture editor. Follow her @mattiekahn.*





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No One Asked About Abortion at the Third Democratic Debate. With Kirsten Gillibrand Out of the Race, No One Brought It Up, Either


It has become an almost tragic joke. Another marathon television event with hours of talk about healthcare, but no mention of abortion, birth control, Title X, or President Donald Trump’s crusade against Planned Parenthood. Last night, ABC News held the third 2020 debate Houston. It was also the third presidential debate ever to include more than one token “woman” on stage, which was good and historic, but you might not have known it from the conversation.

At the end of what felt like four thousand hours of discussion about guns, war, Medicare For All, and immigration, I counted zero questions about not just abortion, but paid leave, child care, or the lethal misogyny that has become its own national crisis in America. The moderators did ask (more than once) about health care, but no candidates used those opportunities to talk about abortion, such a common procedure that more than one in four women have one at some point in their lifetimes.

Instead, we had health care debates that focus on prescription drugs, but didn’t mention a prescription drug that millions of women take daily—the pill. While the candidates made their disdain for our current president clear, none mentioned the fact that he once suggested women should be punished for having abortions, has been accused of sexual assault over a dozen times, or cheated on his third wife with an adult film star whom he then disparaged and paid off. In short, to claim that the President of the United States is a misogynist seems almost unfair to misogynists. He’s at war with 51 percent of the population, some of whom, sure, vote for him. But his relentless crusade against women’s rights is treated as basically a political ploy and not an actual ideology with deadly consequences.

Or at least, that’s how it’s treated now that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is out of the race. In her campaign and at debates, Gillibrand repeatedly raised “women’s issues.” But she dropped out of the race a few weeks ago, because she couldn’t qualify for last night’s debate and also because a lot of people still blame her for kneecapping former Senator Al Franken for (of course!) his alleged mistreatment of women.

To be honest, I was never a Gillibrand fan. From the start, there were other candidates I liked better. But I also can admit I found her “grating” and even a little “unlikable,” which, sure, could be the internalized sexism talking. Regardless, last night, it occurred to me that the only person who had even tried to center Me Too, women’s healthcare, sexual assault, paid leave, and those other denigrated “women’s issues” in their campaign was Kirsten Gillibrand. Gillibrand was for women what Washington Governor Jay Inslee was for climate, taking an under-discussed, but urgent issue and making it the center of her campaign. She and he have both since dropped out of the race (even as lesser candidates like Marianne Williamson and Mayor Bill De Blasio remain). But while Inslee’s proposals on climate have been praised across the board and Elizabeth Warren liked them so much she adopted his entire plan, Gillibrand’s platform has been more or less erased. It’s as if what candidates learned from Gillibrand’s run is…not to talk about women at all.



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