There have been a great many hilarious and misguided attempts to “prove wokeness” on the part of the mainstream media over the past five years, but The New York Times Editorial Board really outdid themselves on Monday with their big presidential endorsement piece. Unable to choose between all the terrific (ahem) candidates left in the Democratic Party primaries, the Times decided to break with tradition and endorse two candidates: Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Seeing as how these women share little common ground in terms of their outlook for the direction of the party, it’s impossible to see this as anything other than: Vote for a woman!
That this endorsement came after a week in which gender politics rose to the forefront of the Democratic race makes their decision all the more suspect. Only a few days earlier, Warren stood on the debate stage and made a point to say that only she and Klobuchar could claim an undefeated record in politics. The same, she carefully emphasized, could not be said for all of the other MEN on the stage. (Hmph!) And of course that statement was predicated and prefigured by the sudden feud that broke out over whether or not Sanders told Warren that a woman couldn’t beat Trump in 2020.
It still doesn’t quite get to the meat of why the Times didn’t simply choose Warren OR Klobuchar, though. In their piece, they explain that they are unwilling to choose between the ultra-left politics of Warren and Sanders and the very-left politics of Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Biden, so they just decided to pick a “standard-bearer” from both lanes. But if that’s the reason, then it’s hard to understand how you could arrive at Warren and Klobuchar. The latter, in particular, is a woman without a base, and her chances of winning the nomination are roughly on par with Garfield’s. As for Warren, she’s running behind “no nominee by the convention” in FiveThirtyEight’s polling predictions.
What makes the reasoning behind the Times’ decision all the more obvious is their over-the-top effort to deny it. A search of the endorsement piece reveals zero instances of the word “female.” Zero instances of the word “gender.” There’s only one instance of the word “women,” and that’s from an irrelevant sentence about Michael Bloomberg’s NDA agreements. And only one instance of the word “woman,” which is in the final sentence of the piece: “May the best woman win.” That the editorial board went this far out of the way to distance itself from identity politics is the best evidence that it formed the basis of their endorsement.
With each passing day, this paper takes a small step towards irrelevance. On Monday, though, it took at least a couple.
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