The Trans-Pacific Partnership has caused an embarrassing feud ‘n’ filibustersituation this week among Democrats, pushing President Barack Obama to slam a senator with whom he is frequently allied. “She’s absolutely wrong,” Obama told Yahoo News of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to the trade deal. “The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else.”
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, another Democrat who opposes Obama’s trade deal, cried foul on these remarks, protesting that the president doesn’t speak so casually about ‘everybody else.’ “I think the president was disrespectful to her,” Brown said Tuesday. “I think that the president has made this more personal than he needed to.” Asked precisely how, Brown intimated sexism. “I think referring to her as first name, when he might not have done that for a male senator, perhaps?”
White House press secretary Josh Earnest shooed off the criticism. “The president has a personal relationship with Senator Warren,” Earnest said Wednesday, on MSNBC. “I can give you all the references of the president referring to his former colleagues in the Senate by their first name.” (For one, a shout to “Sherrod” himself in a speech to an AFL-CIO convention three years ago. And three years before that, also in Columbus, Ohio, “Give Sherrod a big round of applause.”) Earnest said he was “confident” that Brown would “find a way to apologize.” Brown, asked if he wished to say sorry, sidestepped.
“What’s in a name?” Juliet, only daughter of Capulet, once famously asked. It can be difficult to gauge very much when a name is spoken; the relationship between the speaker and the person being spoken of (or to) may be hard to know, and bias might be unconscious. All the same, onlookers chimed in. Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, saidshe believed that Obama’s remark was “sexist” and belittling, that Obama “was trying to build up his own trustworthiness on this issue by convincing us that Senator Warren’s concerns are not to be taken seriously.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz—Brown’s wife—tweeted in praise of her husband’s take. But Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, called Brown’s remarks “silliness.” McCaskill said, on MSNBC, “The president and Elizabeth Warren are friends. I think if he would have called her Senator Warren, someone would have said, ‘Oh he’s giving her the cold shoulder.’” She added, “I would be freaked out if he didn’t call me by my first name.”
Joseph Uscinski and Lilly Goren have written together about the role of names in politics. Speaking by phone Wednesday, Uscinski, a political science professor at the University of Miami, said he did not find Obama’s language toward Warren sexist. He said he has observed that Obama, and Vice President Joseph Biden, often use first names. “It’s to show familiarity. It’s a sign of endearment to the person.” It closes distance, he said. Uscinski pointed to a 2012 vice presidential debate in which Paul Ryan insinuated the Obama administration’s unfriendliness toward Israel. To which Biden replied, “With regard to Bibi, he’s been my friend for 39 years!” This use of the Israeli prime minister’s nickname was a shorthand way of saying,Look, Bibi and I go way back. This kind of language, Uscinski said, “makes the disagreement look smaller.” He believes that this was Obama’s goal in calling Warren by her first name: to show how close they really are.
Goren, a professor at Carroll University in Wisconsin, has written a number of books on women and politics. For her, the issue isn’t really about exchanges between politicians. “When they are on the floor of the House or the Senate,” she said, “they have to abide by these rules—‘my esteemed colleague from South Carolina.’ Whereas in conversation, we know they don’t call each other that, they call each other by each other’s first names.”
The more important vector, Goren said, is what names the media use. Biden might call his vice-presidential debate opponent Paul, but, Goren said, “no one is running around calling Paul Ryan ‘Paul,’ from a media perspective. That’s a different position—it becomes a way in which the public is consuming that person, or being told to, essentially, consume that person.”
Four years ago, Uscinski and Goren published a paper in the Political Research Quarterly that homed in on the media coverage Hillary Clinton received in the 2008 primary. (Who could forget charming lines like “There’s just something about her that feels castrating, overbearing, and scary” or “When she comes on TV, I involuntarily cross my legs”?) Their article particuarly focused on names. “Referencing a woman by first name may project an image of inferiority,” Uscinski and Goren said, comparing Clinton (“HRC”) with Obama (“BHO”). They cited the work of Erica Falk, author of Women for President:Media Bias in Nine Campaigns, in writing:
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