As the predictable impeachment saga moved into its trial stage in the Senate, candidates for the Democratic nomination were paying Donald Trump little heed.
That might be considered bizarre, given the time frame. How often has a president faced impeachment in an election year?
But the candidates know it’s a foregone conclusion that Mr. Trump will be acquitted, that the drama is all about party-line bias, that it isn’t affecting the political standings, that Americans are hardly riveted by it. In my recent travels in several states, it hasn’t come up in conversations unless I raised it.
So instead of piling on Donald Trump, the Democrats are piling on one another.
With her campaign faltering, Elizabeth Warren has been the lead disruptor. She vaulted herself back into the headlines in the Iowa debate last week with a half-baked, identity-politics smear on her fellow socialistically inclined rival Bernie Sanders. She alleged he’d told her in 2018 that a women couldn’t win the presidency.
Bernie Sanders moved into attack mode as well, his campaign circulating a video distorting frontrunner Joe Biden’s position on social security, suggesting he wished to cut it. While Mr. Biden has leaned in that direction at times in his career, he has no such intent now.
Alas, Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders will have to cool their heels for a while now as the impeachment process compels them, being senators, to stay in Washington.
Their rather specious clash on a woman’s electability has had a big news-cycle impact, with initial indications being that their going after one another has helped the man they need to beat – Joe Biden.
Mr. Sanders’s record toward women has largely been one of respect. And as he said in reply to Ms. Warren’s charge, it’s ridiculous to suggest a woman can’t win, given Hillary Clinton’s victory in the popular vote in 2016.
Ms. Warren’s charge also raised more questions, given her track record, about her trustworthiness. Had she been so upset about what Mr. Sanders allegedly said in 2018, it would have come out much earlier than now.
It’s hardly the first time she’s looked duplicitous. The most infamous instance was when she tried portraying herself as having Native American ancestry, only to have it subsequently shown that she had next to no such lineage. She eventually got around to apologizing.
She’s also tried to portray herself as coming from a struggling family by saying her father worked as a janitor. That brought on an angry rebuke from her brother: “My dad was never a janitor.” (Her father, they seem to agree, did maintenance work after he suffered a heart attack.)
Ms. Warren also talked about her two kids going to public schools. That could be easily checked, and it was deemed a half-truth at best; her son, Alexander, attended two private schools, including the elite Haverford School in Philadelphia.
Campaigning for re-election to the Senate in 2018, she pledged to constituents to serve the full six-year term. No sooner had she won than she announced her 2020 presidential bid.
Given Donald Trump’s performance, given the tenor of the times, she may think she can get away with truth-shaving. And she may be right.
Her misrepresentations, for instance, don’t seem to bother The New York Times. It endorsed her this week as one its two choices for Democratic nominee, the other being Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar.
But in a sign Ms. Warren’s move against long-time friend and political soulmate Bernie Sanders hasn’t paid off, she has been trying to steer discussion away from her gender-politics accusation.
Even TV’s late-night barb-thrower Bill Maher, who usually saves his best shots for Republicans, has been running her down, saying “It seems like the same people who were saying Hillary Clinton lost due to sexism are now saying, ‘How dare you say a woman can’t be elected president?’” Ms. Warren was “sinking like a rock,” he said and trying to save her campaign.
It’s not clear she’s doing so badly. In the Iowa debate, she had an otherwise powerful performance. With large numbers of Democratic voters in the early primary states undecided, much can change. Her fight with Mr. Sanders seems to have given Mr. Biden a boost at a most opportune time. He’s habitually trailed in the Iowa caucuses, the first big primary test.
But a poll Monday showed him in the lead there. If he takes that one, he’ll be well positioned to seize the nomination.
Lawrence Martin