The trouble with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) — at least according to columnist Ciro Scotti writing in The Daily Beast Friday morning — is that she’s a politician.
“For Gillibrand, nearly every move seems to be a self-serving playing of the angles,” Scotti writes. “While it’s not surprising to see a politician behave this way, Gillibrand seems to be an especially egregious practitioner of the finger-in-the-wind politics that so many voters can no longer abide.”
Scotti’s column details Gillibrand’s transformation from a Blue Dog Democrat with an A rating from the NRA to one of the more progressive members of the Senate. But what bothers Scotti more than her shifting policy positions is the fact that, in recent weeks, Gillibrand has called for former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) and President Trump to resign over allegations of sexual misconduct and said last November that President Bill Clinton should’ve resigned after the Monica Lewinsky affair came to light.
Scotti paints her admonishments as evidence of the fact that the junior senator from New York is too transparently calculating to be a viable presidential nominee in 2020. The reality is that Gillibrand is one of the few public figures who has publicly condemned all three of the men. If doing so was such an opportunistic power grab, then why didn’t Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer jump on the train with her? (It’s Schumer, of course, who is so widely known to be self-serving and publicity hungry that politicos often joke that the most dangerous place in Washington is between Chuck Schumer and a camera.)
Scotti also criticizes Gillibrand for voting against the appointment of Defense Secretary Mattis, describing him as “a dedicated professional who is arguably the most independent member of the Trump Cabinet.”
“Did she really think Mattis, a former four-star Marine general known as a strategic thinker as well as a warrior, was unqualified to be the secretary of defense?” he writes. “Or was that part of her strategy of opposing almost every Trump Cabinet nominee, thus positioning herself to be able to go for a cheap applause line at some Democratic debate in the future?”
A cursory Google search reveals that Gillibrand has answered these questions time and time again. Appointing Mattis required waiving a law that requires defense secretaries to have been out of the military for seven years, something Gillibrand said she simply could not get behind.
“He has served our country admirably,” she said of Mattis in January last year. “He is well-regarded as an extraordinary general, and I am very grateful for that service, and I’m very grateful that he’s willing to continue his service for the president-elect. But I still believe that civilian control of our military is fundamental to the American democracy.”
Of course, it’s likely Gillibrand will use her opposition to all of Trump’s nominees in her likely run for the highest office in the land, but if you’re going to write a take-down, you ought to know your recent history.
Most — if not all — politicians, regardless of ideology, are self-serving, calculating, and power hungry. The rest of the likely Democratic field, for instance — from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to Cory Booker (D-NJ) to Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and back again — has also been making transparently calculating moves of late. On any given day, a dozen or so members of the Senate Democratic caucus are being talked about as presidential candidates in 2020, and every politician in that conversation is in the spotlight because they’re voting against Trump nominees, giving scathing speeches at rallies against his health care and tax plans, releasing books, or offering loophole-ridden non-denials about whether they’ll run for president.
This is not to say that Gillibrand does not deserve scrutiny, nor is it to say she is the ideal Democratic nominee. To many in the Democratic base that supported Sanders during the 2016 primaries, Gillibrand isn’t progressive enough, and her Blue Dog history is likely to cause her problems on the national stage. Gillibrand, like every politician, should be questioned, her motives should be criticized, her policy stances interrogated, and her history unpacked.
But to single her out, to paint her as uniquely self-serving and particularly calculating is not only objectively false, it’s also sexist. The characterization reinforces stereotypes lodged against women for decades: Women cannot handle politics, they’re too fragile, too beta, too dumb, damned to a menstrual cycle. And then when a woman comes along and plays by the very rules that have excluded her for so long, someone writes a column about how — now — she’s simply too strategic to ever be viable in politics.