I Forced Myself to Read Jake Tapper’s Book

Don’t believe the gushing reviews from members of the club. It isn’t “King Lear.” It isn’t even decent political history. It allows Trump to emerge unscathed. Let me deconstruct it for you.

I didn’t want to read the book.¹

But then what I think of as the “Shattered Phenomenon” began to take shape.

The phenomenon starts with some well-known reporters (not historians) who get to schmooze with a bunch of Washington insiders and journalist pals who vent their anger and disappointment about the election “on background”(no names.) They pull a shitload of impressionistic quotes, imagined thoughts and novelistic, hyperbolic descriptions into a narrative. They make sure to highlight the candidate’s worst moments (even the most trivial and nearly all of them pertaining to “optics”) and skip quickly over the best. They (or their editors) slap on a sensational title and a subtitle that promises to reveal the truth of why Hillary/Kamala/Biden lost the 2016/2024 elections. And then they make the rounds of all the news and interview shows, virtually all of them hosted by colleagues whose interest is in promoting their friend’s book, not challenging its narrative. (On Piers Morgan, Tapper gets away with claiming that “it [the Biden “cover up”] may be worse than Watergate.”)

The book reviewers seem unconcerned about “balance,” the contribution of these books to the historical record, or the fact that Donald Trump is either a missing person (“Original Sin”) or comes off as a conquering hero (Allen and Parnes’ latest, “Fight”) They alternatively praise the book the way one would describe a work of fiction (“Reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids”—The Los Angeles Times) or as a definitive, “deeply reported,” “well-sourced” historical account that “takes a sledgehammer to Joe Biden’s legacy, already in grave disrepair” (Rolling Stone). This reviewers’ glee—after all, this is a highly clickable “scoop” for him too—is shameful. “For anyone interested in politics and Shakespearean tragedy, there’s something on every page,” he writes.

.”Great beach read!! Spread out your blanket and dig right in!!

Of course, these books become best-sellers.

The real tragedy is not that Biden was a King Lear (or Hillary a Lady MacBeth) but that these books—written and promoted by some of the very reporters who had harassed Hillary about her “secrecy,” her emails, her avoidance of “the press” (something they did, too, with Kamala), pummeled Biden, in interviews and Op Eds with the “age issue” while accepting Trump’s incoherencies and lies as “business as usual”—will become the uncontested, official accounts of the elections of 2016 and 2024.

It’s already happened with “Shattered.” Written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, media-insiders and familiar faces on MSNBC, Shattered is loaded with gossipy kvetching from disgruntled members of the Clinton campaign who provide “evidence” of the then received wisdom (Michael Moore leading the pack of the many Hillary-blaming post-mortems) that Hillary lost because she ran a terrible campaign (and was nasty to her staff, a familiar charge made against Amy Klobucher, Kamala Harris, and every other woman who has dared to run for the presidency²)Shattered” provides scant mention of Comey’s eleventh-hour (and as it turned out, totally mistaken) stirring of the email pot. Russian interference is merely a passing aside. Sexism? Barely discussed, but frequently exhibited. (“Hillary’s severe, controlled voice … carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping”) And—of course—no mention of the massive and well-documented negative reporting on Hillary. No, the “core problem” (as Allen and Parnes put it} “was Hillary herself.”

Have we yet to see a rejoinder to that diagnosis? Well, I wrote one—and the mainstream media ignored it. Hillary wrote one, too—and the mainstream media bashed Hillary for “blaming everything except herself.”³

“Shattered” continues to occupy Amazon best-seller lists. Buoyed by its success, Allen and Parnes have tried to repeat it with “Fight,” which claims in its subtitle to go “inside the wildest battle for the White House.” Actually, though, most of the book is not about the contest between Trump and Harris, but is devoted to Biden’s resistance to leaving the race and the lack of faith key Democrats had in Kamala.

Once Joe dropped out Kamala, we’re told, “rode a political wave” (sometimes reporters called it a “sugar high.”) But she failed to “define herself” or produce a solid “economic” prospectus.⁴ The book underplays her most dazzling successes, such as her debate with Trump. They admit she “ran circles around Trump,” but added that “Trump landed serious blows” and “revealed the holes in Harris’s platform.”

“Serious blows” and “holes” in Harris’s platform are not exactly how I remember that debate. Nor do I remember Kamala “enjoying” “an uninterrupted wave” of positive media attention for “nearly two months,” as Allen and Parnes claim. I do remember—and chronicled in my stacks throughout the election—how the media harassed her for not submitting to their own desire to make “breaking news” with interview gotchas. (Of course, that’s not how they would describe it.)

As for Trump, they leave the reader with the impression that he ran an almost flawless campaign and a deserved victory. The book opens with a torturously drawn-out account of Biden’s debate performance, from “His face is so pallid, Pelosi thought” to the “cavalcade of stumbles” and “word salad” that showed Biden was “bereft of coherent thought.” Allen and Parnes offer no criticism whatsoever of Trump’s disconnected barrage of lies, false accusations, and evasions. The last line of the book has Trump at “the moment of reward” tell his followers, “We’ve been through so much together, and for the next four years, I will fight for you.” Gag. There’s no mention of the millions of dollars that Elon Musk pumped into Trump’s disinformation-and-attack-machine or the sweet spots of misogyny and racism that drew disgruntled young bros to Trump.

“Original Sin” (a blasphemous title if I ever saw one) takes what is a (very long) prelude in “Fight”—Biden’s resistance to leaving the race—and turns it into a whole book about Joe’s ego-investment in running and his supporters’ failure to acknowledge the extent of his decline. (Not surprisingly—it’s one of those tropes often applied to interfering wives operating “behind the scenes”—it’s suggested that Jill Biden played a big role in the “cover-up.”) It is heavily implied, although never stated outright by Tapper and Thompson, that Biden is to blame for Trump’s victory. They quote (and throughout the book appear to agree with) a “prominent Democratic strategist” as saying “It was an abomination. He stole an election from the Democratic party; he stole it from the American people.”“ “I blame his inner circle and I blame him,” said a “senior administration official, “what total and utter hubris not to step aside.”

These overblown literary/biblical references (“original sin,” “hubris”) accuse Biden of both the fatal flaw of tragic figures in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy and the “original” Christian sin. His arrogance, his pride, his failure to heed all the warnings, is responsible for our eviction from the garden (and descent into Trumpian hell.) From the Penguin books PR: “What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless—a desperate bet that went bust—and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents.”

Throughout “Original Sin,” Tapper and Thompson hammer away at how profound Biden’s “cognitive decline” was (emphasis mine) and that, after all, is what should be of significance. (Franklin Roosevelt was in a wheelchair, for heaven’s sake!!) Yet except for their discussion of the game-changing debate between Trump and Biden (more about which shortly), slips of the tongue, forgetting of names, and some Bidenesque gaffes of the sort he’s been making all during his career, the overwhelming “evidence” is all purely physical. Mention of Biden’s “shuffle” and the stiffness of his “gait” appear over and over. Tripping over a sandbag. Looking “frail” and tired. Speaking in a whispery voice.The crime of needing naps in the middle of the day. Trouble with steps. The authors seem obsessed with Biden’s inability to walk with a confident stride—a pretty common feature of the aging process, having nothing to do with cognitive fitness—and they even gratuitously (and unfairly) include a description of Biden leaving a plane—when he had COVID!!

It’s easy to follow Tapper and Thompson along as they make their case largely via comments from other politicians and journalists (rather than, say, medical evaluations) without recognizing or reminding oneself that almost all of what his interviewees have to say is purely impressionistic—which is to say, interpretive. Did Biden actually not recognize George Clooney on the receiving line of a benefit? I have no idea. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I know it’s possible—at any age—to become something of an unthinking automaton while greeting people at a reception. When I was much younger and on the speakers’ circuit I had post-talk receptions held for me during which I was more or less in a fog, exhausted from traveling and presenting my talk. I’m sure there were people I knew that I didn’t immediately recognize.

I don’t know what the case was with Biden on this occasion. But Tapper and Johnson don’t even allow for any possibilities other than what was reported to them by some un-named “Hollywood VIP”—and I assume, what Clooney told them (it’s hard to know because they tell the story in that “imagining what Clooney thought” mode):

“Clooney looked to the side and saw Obama walking in, grayer but still spry and electric. A few minutes later, Secret Service agents entered the room and announced that President Biden had arrived. Biden hobbled out from around the corner. Clooney knew the president had just arrived from the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Apulia, Italy, that morning and might be tired, but hooooooooooly shit, he wasn’t expecting this. The president appeared severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him in December 2022. He was taking tiny steps and had an aide guiding him by his arm. “It was like watching someone who was not alive,” a Hollywood VIP recalled. “It was startling. And we all looked at each other. It was so awful.” “Thank you for being here,” the president said to guests as he walked past them. “Thank you for being here.” Clooney felt a knot form in his stomach as the president approached him. Biden looked at him. “Thank you for being here,” he said. “Thank you for being here.” “You know George,” the assisting aide told the president, gently reminding him who was in front of him. “Yeah, yeah,” the president said to one of the most recognizable men in the world, the host of this lucrative fundraiser. “Thank you for being here.” “Hi, Mr. President,” Clooney said. “How are ya?” the president replied. “How was your trip?” Clooney asked. “It was fine,” the president said. It was obvious to many standing there that the president did not know who George Clooney was. “It was not okay,” recalled the Hollywood VIP who had witnessed this moment….Clooney was shaken to his core. The president hadn’t recognized him. A man he had known for years….A White House aide had told him a few months before that they were working on getting the president to take longer steps when he walked—but obviously the problem went far beyond his gait. This was much graver. This was the president of the United States?”

I’ve bolded those parts that suggest the high drama of grave decline that the authors are going for. Note, too, the gratuitous contrast between “spry and electric” Obama and “hobbling” Biden.(In a different passage, they contrast “charismatic, energetic” Macron and the “enfeebled” Biden.) And why would Clooney’s stomach get all knotted up before Biden reached him on the line? If Biden really looked that terrible (“like someone who was not alive”) why didn’t someone suggest the president sit down after all his travels and labors at the G7 summit?

I could go through many other passages that left me stunned by the selective and strident nature of “Original Sin”’s arguments, which rely heavily on “optics” but give no credence to any competing considerations. Every time they (grudgingly) include a quotation that emphasized Biden’s actual accomplishments and solid decision-making throughout the period in which he was supposedly declining precipitously they make sure to pivot to the importance of presidential “performance” on stage. They neglect to question the relative significance of each or scrutinize the role the media played—well before the debate, and greatly intensifying after it—in creating the constant drumroll about Biden’s age and in failing to distinguish between “optics,” impressions, and factually-grounded data. They cite polls that—again, well before the debate—were peppered with leading questions regarding Biden’s age. (Arguably, to even ask such questions is by itself “leading”)

The most glaring example of “Original Sins” failures is their discussion of the debate as the moment when, as one reviewer put it, “the jig was up” and “America saw what had been kept hidden: a man long past his prime, but still inexplicably auditioning to retain the most important job in the world. It was undeniable and damning…One of the most stunning moments in recent presidential history, when the scales fell from a nation’s eyes.”

I, like everyone else I knew, was disturbed by the debate.. “What’s wrong with Joe?” I asked my husband, who was equally upset. “Why doesn’t he just call out all the lies? Just stop the nonsense and say something like ‘How can I possibly respond to such a stream of crap??’” I so wanted him to declare the whole thing a corruption of what a debate is supposed to be like, to forcefully take the offensive, but he didn’t seem up to that task. And I wondered if Donald Trump’s stream-of-consciousness, lie-a-minute barrage of non-answers and irrelevant attacks might have had something to do with Biden’s discombobulation.

The next day my wonderings were reinforced by historian Heather Cox Richardson, who posted on substack and Facebook:

“Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness….His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list.

….This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

There are ways to combat the Gish gallop—by calling it out for what it is, among other ways—but Biden retreated to trying to give the three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand. His command of those points was notable, but the difference between how he sounded at the debate and how he sounded on stage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, just a day afterward suggested that the technique worked on him.

That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.”

But Heather Cox Richardson’s comments never made it to prime-time postmortems about the debate. In those, commentators went straight to whether Joe was “unfit,” “mentally deficient,” “senile,” and “not up to the job of president.” Soon after came the Opinion Pieces calling for Biden to drop out of the race, the television interviews with those Democrats demanding he do so, and armchair diagnoses of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. No one bothered to consult Biden’s latest medical report, which had ruled those out:

(From the report on Biden’s February, 2024 medical examination.)

Then, predictably, came the polls. And then more opinion pieces, alarmist chyrons, and headlines. The New York Times lectured to Biden that he should drop out “for the sake of the country.” MSNBC interviewed and interviewed all the “He must drop out” politicians, and very, very few ordinary people. In this way the media colluded (whether they realized it or not) to turn 90 minutes of one performance into what Daniel Boorstin called a “pseudo-event”: a televised event made more vibrant, more attention-commanding, more “real” by constant repetition in the media. And Trump was having a victory-dance, as into the purgatory of inattention went his reprehensible (although more “robust”) debate performance. His lying babbling should have been torn apart sentence by sentence. But the story of his appalling performance never got a chance to “get legs,” because Trump’s lies were no longer—actually, never had been—headline news. The media, over the years, had helped normalize those lies largely by ignoring them. The more shocking, headline-worthy story was Biden.

Tapper and Johnson (and Allen and Parnes) continue to let Trump off the hook, both in that debate and in their “theories” about why he won. Their accounts of the debate focus on Biden’s worst moments and allow Trump’s performance to remain unscrutinized. Their theories of why he won the election basically come down to: Biden/Kamala/the Democrats botched it. And in the case of the “Biden cover-up” behaved in as ethically rotten a manner as the participants in Watergate.

At one point, as if anticipating that someone might fact-check their lopsided account of the debate, Tapper and Johnson warn that “the transcript doesn’t do justice to [Biden’s] difficulty finding the words, his facial expression as he closed his eyes to root around for what he was trying to say.” So of course, I went right to the transcript—and discovered that minus the “optics” Biden’s responses were far, far better than Trump’s. Neither man stayed on point, both rambled, both were less than adept at forming and finishing sentences. But athough Biden struggled, often in open-mouthed disbelief (and, as we later learned, feeling ill) to find his footing against the tumble of Trump’s lies and attacks, the substance of nearly all his answers was solid. You can see, reading the transcript, how unbalanced the commentators were. Perhaps they were conned by Trump’s more “robust” physicality and braggadocio, perhaps his performance seemed “normal” to them (read: what was expected—and accepted—of Trump), perhaps they recoiled more at Joe’s “weakness” than Trump’s bullying.

Should Biden have dropped out sooner? Maybe. But I doubt that things would have turned out any differently. To attribute Trump’s victory to the fact that we didn’t have the time for an open primary (which would have resulted in racially divisive chaos) or that Kamala got in too late is to vastly underestimate the demonic forces (and mega-bucks) behind Trump’s corrupt, lying campaign. Here are some things that neither “Fight” or “Original Sin” give any credence to that I’d like to mention. They are taken from a previous stack, but in light of these books are worth, I believe, a repeat “performance”:

Some things to remember:

How the mainstream media empowered Trump and continually raised doubts about Biden—and then Harris—and steadfastly refuses to acknowledge their role. In the hundreds of books and articles and interviews and panels that have “diagnosed” the disastrous outcomes of both 2016 and 2024, the mainstream media has never featured any discussions focusing on their own responsibility. The reason? It means taking themselves to task. The New York Times and MSNBC aren’t about to promote a major expose of their failings. Hillary/Kamala/Biden blaming will do just fine, thanks.

How It didn’t matter that Kamala had economic proposals and Trump just had “concepts.” How she travelled to the swing states, over and over, working tirelessly. (That old 2016 blame —that Hillary failed to go there at the end—was finally proven BS.) What mattered was that she didn’t talk or look “working-class” to white people (Black people knew better) but like a successful, professional, career-oriented woman. (The little Black girl who was bussed to a different district? She was forgotten, an old image from the distant history of the 2019 primaries.) What mattered was that she was married to a Jewish lawyer instead of an upstanding white Christian. What mattered was that she had the nerve to have all those degrees. What mattered was that she was without biological children (and didn’t seem to have even tried.) What mattered was a self-assurance (“I’m speaking now”) that delighted Black women and Black and white feminists but was read as “uppity” by white suburban moms (not just a Black woman’s problem, Hillary had it too.) What mattered was the men who felt “unmanned” by all the women who they believed had taken the jobs that were rightfully theirs, and who knew a gorgeous, confident woman like Kamala would never be interested in dating them.

What mattered was a corporate “liberal” media who harassed her—as they had Hillary—for ignoring their demands for “hardball” interviews, who criticized her for preferring “softball” conversations, who seemed to be determined, once they got her to “sit down” with them, to expose “flip-flops” and treated her discomfort in answering “yes or no” questions as “word salad.” What mattered were the headlines and chyrons and leading questions that were the only sources of “news” for many people. Did she have what it takes to be POTUS? Would she fall apart without a teleprompter? Are “vibes” and “joy” all she has to offer? Is there any “substance” to her?

What mattered was that Kamala—actually any Democrat running for office—had to wade through a mountain of right-wing disinformation about “cultural” issues. Like babies being killed at birth. Like pet-eating immigrants. Like kids being given sex-change operations during recess.

And they then had the nerve to say Trump won because of “the economy”? Because Kamala, after giving Democrats a ‘sugar high’, had petered out, unable to “define herself” or distinguish herself from Biden. Because Biden and his supporters had committed the sin of trying to “cover up” the fact that he was old.

Donald Trump had nothing to say to the “working class” other than magic words like “tariffs” and “groceries” and assurances that he alone could “fix it” by making sure immigrants don’t steal your jobs and rape your women and eat your pets. He won because of the mythology that he created and even the most decent of the Republicans swallowed or were silent about or were afraid to challenge. He won because he managed to convince those that were hurting that he would be their redemption, their retribution, their savior. When he was “reborn”—his ear barely grazed by something, maybe a bullet, maybe a tiny shard of glass—it fit right into that mythology. And so, too, did the persecution narrative, aided by the dedicated corrupt brilliance of the right-wing media. The deification of Trump made it easy to believe that, as with Jesus, all the charges against him were a witch-hunt, a “weaponization” of justice.

People voted for Trump not for his “economic policies” but because they mistook a reality-show creation for actual success at business. Because he was so “manly,” even when posing for a mug shot. Because he didn’t let the liberal press call the shots when he was on trial, but had the balls to insist on his own unhinged rants outside the courtroom in which he charged, over and over, that every prosecutor, judge, and jury who were “against him” had been hand-picked by “Biden’s DOJ.” And then took no questions from the press. (And for some strange reason, the press wasn’t as furious with him as they were with Kamala Harris when she “avoided” meeting with them in the two weeks after the DNC, as she travelled across the country.)

Young men voted for Donald because they liked all the faults that Dems mistakenly thought they’d recoil from: saying whatever disgusting thing he wanted to, doing whatever he felt like, grabbing any pussies in his vicinity. They liked that he said “fuck you” to the feminists. They didn’t want an accomplished, educated, articulate woman that made them feel “less than,” and they especially didn’t want a mixed-race woman with stature and confidence and a big laugh. They wanted a mirror of and permission to be themselves, just as they are. Donald gave them that.

Trump won not because of the price of eggs or Kamala’s inadequacies as a candidate or Biden’s “original sin”—but because too many men (and some, but far fewer women) still can’t deal with the idea of a woman president.⁵

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1. On Monday, I posted this on FB, then did a movie stack instead of the political stack I’d been planning. I discovered, from the comments, that lots of people felt the same way:

I had a crisis as a writer yesterday. Which for me is also existential—not in the media sense of “fatal to continued existence” but in the philosophical sense of what Sartre called an encounter with nothingness.

I woke up full of things I wanted to say about the Biden-blaming of recent political “scoop” journalists. I had plans to discuss their Hillary-blaming and Kamala-blaming too—while letting Trump (and the media itself) off the hook. It’s something I’ve written about in various ways since 2016. I’ve felt a compulsion to call out every media and journalistic outrage, every willful, self-justifying book and Op-Ed, every harassing interview. Sometimes I ask myself why I keep pummeling away at this. But that’s like asking why I am who I am.

I always read (or watch) whatever I’m going to write about, and that’s meant forcing myself to slog through a lot of hateful, superficial, self-satisfied crap. People keep asking me why I still watch Morning Joe, still read the latest hit-job. The answer is always the same: so I can write about it. I’m not deluded; I know what I write has no chance of making its way to the people who actually are in a position to change things. But this thing I do is in my DNA; there’s no escape.

But this Tapper book and the other one—I just haven’t been able to force myself to read it. And after I saw some reviews in The New York Times that resistance mophed into something like nausea. The review quoted enough from the book to show me what I’d be in for:

“As early as 2022, Biden was mangling basic facts in public, claiming his son died in Iraq and not of brain cancer, and calling out to the already dead.”

“The napping, the whispering, the shuffling”

“When making videos, his aides sometimes filmed “in slow motion to blur the reality of how slowly he actually walked.”

“His booming voice had become a whisper…his confident stride had become a shuffle.”

And of the debate that “exposed” the “cover-up,” the “original sin” (a sacrilegious book title if I ever saw one):

“Donald Trump let loose a barrage of audacious whoppers whil Biden, slack-jawed and pale, struggled to string together intelligible rebuttals.”

I knew I could deconstruct and expose the superficiality of the agism (shuffle apparently being a sign of utter decrepitude)the selection of trivial slips, forgetting of names, to bloat into “incompetence” and “cover-up.” But the futility of doing that overwhelmed me, and every time I tried to apply my brain-muscle to the task, something very like grief swamped me. The magnitude of the cruelty, the failure of proportion, the sacrifice of history, of this good man and excellent president, to the fun and profit of a “scoop” was just too much. I couldn’t bring myself to be the outraged critic. That “job” was no match for my sadness, the feeling of defeat—not just for myself personally, but for everything and everyone who fights with words, with reason, with facts, with compassion.

When journalists become so cruel, so bullying, so self-promoting, so indifferent to history, Trump has won in a way that is scarier and sadder than the taking of the White House.

2. One headline of a “Shattered” review read “Hillary even witchier than we thought.” Then, when the candidates first announced in the 2019 primaries, weeks of serial salivating over male “charisma” went by without a mention of the ground-breaking policies—on childcare, education, taxes, health-scare—that Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar regularly proposed. But the vaguest promise of bitchy gossip and the headlines popped up: “Kirsten Gillibrand Still Struggling to Make any 2020 Friends,” “Kamala Harris Hasn’t spoken to women who filed sexual harassment law suit against ex-aide,” and of course the iconic “How Amy Klobuchar Treats her Staff” in which the New York Times excoriated Klobuchar for “losing patience” with an aide for failing to supply her with a plastic fork for her salad. “What happened next was typical: Ms. Klobuchar berated her aide instantly for the slip-up” and after improvising with a comb, “handed the comb to her staff member with a directive: Clean it.”So among the women candidates we had a mean boss who eats salad with a comb, a pretender to Native-American ancestry (Elizabeth Warren) who some have described as a hectoring schoolmarm, and a prosecutor who loves putting people in jail,

3. Hillary’s book was an mega-bestseller. But pundits complained that Hillary should stop “re-litigating” the past, and recognize it’s time to “move on.” The Sunday before the book was published, Susan Chira in The New York Times called Hillary “the woman who won’t go away” and—in keeping with the narrative promoted by Shattered—chastised her for “blaming everything but herself.” The problem, it seemed, was Hillary’s attitude: people wanted her to be more humble, to beg forgiveness for her sins. (She’d always had that “too uppity” problem.)

4. False. Kamala didn’t bellow like Sanders, but she did propose an “opportunity economy” that had actual plans (not just “concepts” of plans) for making the cost of housing, child-care, senior-care, education less back-breaking. She didn’t talk metaphorically about “kitchen table issues”; she recalled the actual kitchen table at which her actual working-class mother sat, figuring out how to pay the bills. She vividly described the everyday challenges of caring for aging parents—and proposed actual dollars that would help buy the soothing lotion for papery skin. And she insisted that reproductive choice and access was itself an “economic issue.”

Could it be her examples and emphases were too female-oriented to be taken seriously as “an economic agenda”?

For more on the 2024 election, see my weekly stacks during the election.

5. There’s now statistical evidence demonstrating that voters’ gender played a huge role in the election: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/democrats-male-voters-2024-election-trump-harris-rcna209582.