CNN | The stakes were high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met at Warren's apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in December 2018. The longtime friends knew that they could soon be running against each other for president.
The
two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential
candidates, they should remain civil and avoid attacking one another, so
as not to hurt the progressive movement. They also discussed how to
best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main
reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a
robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female
voters.
Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.
The
description of that meeting is based on the accounts of four people:
two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two
people familiar with the meeting.
That
evening, Sanders expressed frustration at what he saw as a growing
focus among Democrats on identity politics, according to one of the
people familiar with the conversation. Warren told Sanders she disagreed
with his assessment that a woman could not win, three of the four
sources said.
Sanders denied the characterization of the meeting in a statement to CNN.
"It
is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren
told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a
woman couldn't win," Sanders said. "It's sad that, three weeks before
the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who
weren't in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that
night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would
weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of
course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes
in 2016."
Warren's communications director Kristen Orthman declined to comment.
0 comments:
Post a Comment