By Annie Linskey and
David Weigel
January 3 at 8:45 PM
Just hours after Elizabeth Warren announced her plans to run for president, a question began surfacing about a possible weakness. It wasn’t derived from opposition research into some facet of her life. It had nothing to do with her policy ideas.
It was the question often asked of female candidates and rarely of men: Is she “likable†enough to be president? Others put it another, potentially more devastating, way: Is she too much like Hillary Clinton to be the nominee?
It’s not just the Democratic female senator from Massachusetts who may feel compelled to come up with an answer. The 2020 presidential campaign is expected to include the largest-ever field of female candidates, all of them campaigning in the wake of the defeat of the first female nominee of a major party.
The reasons for Clinton’s loss are still debated two years after the election. But even as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was elected House speaker on Wednesday, the women looking at White House campaigns continue to shoulder gendered criticism and demands not placed on their male counterparts: to be strong but not too tough; to be assertive without being pushy, lest voters turn away for reasons that they may not acknowledge are sexist but that researchers say are.
The website McSweeney’s covered the flap over Warren’s likability with a report whose headline, while satirical, made a pungent point: “I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary and Coincidentally I’m Starting to Hate Elizabeth Warren.â€
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/before-you-run-against-trump-you-have-to-run-against-hillary-if-youre-a-woman/2019/01/03/f552fc0c-0ec9-11e9-831f-3aa2c2be4cbd_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ce364136284c
