McCaskill: Calling Obama sexist is silly

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) says it’s silly to think that President Obama’s criticism of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is sexist.

“It’s silliness, the president and Elizabeth Warren are friends,” McCaskill said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“He went to bat for Elizabeth Warren in terms of the Consumer Protection Bureau; they worked closely together on Dodd-Frank. He just thinks she is wrong on this, and he has the right to say that,” McCaskill said.

Obama thinks Warren is wrong in opposing his trade agenda, and he’s repeatedly said so publicly.

That’s rubbed some Democrats the wrong way, and it might be having an effect on the congressional debate. Obama suffered a bruising defeat on trade, when the Senate voted Tuesday against picking up a trade bill backed by the White House.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) suggested Obama’s comments about Warren after that vote were sexist.

He said the president’s habit of referring to Warren by her first name was something he might not have done with a male lawmaker.

“I think the president was disrespectful to her by the way he did that,” Brown told reporters, according to Politico.

“I think that the president has made this more personal than he needed to.”

Terry O’Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, echoed those charges in statement given to The Hill.

But McCaskill downplayed those concerns on MSNBC.  

“I think if he would have called her Sen. Warren, someone would have said, ‘Oh, he’s giving her the cold shoulder,’ ” she said.

“I would be freaked out if he didn’t call me by my first name. We’ve known each other for a while.”

McConnell, who voted against the president on Tuesday, blamed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for the impasse. She said he should have included a customs bill focused on trade enforcement as part of the broader package of trade bills being considered.

“I think there is more than a dozen of us that want to vote for trade; we think it’s really important for American manufacturers to have this market; we think it’s really important geopolitically to check China,” she said.

“But for some reason, we had really strong enforcement provisions that came out of the committee on a bipartisan basis, but Mitch McConnell left those out.”