Gillibrand campaign links low fundraising to Al Franken backlash: memo

[Trumpocalypse]

254. Did you bother to read the links.

First, none say that Gillibrand "led the charge", just that she was the first to call for his resignation and was followed immediately by several other Senators.

As stated in the CNN article:

(CNN)Nearly three weeks after sexual harassment allegations first emerged against Sen. Al Franken, a wave of Democratic senators — in coordination and following a flurry of text messages and phone calls — called for his resignation in rapid succession Wednesday morning.

Starting around 11:30 a.m. ET, the senators posted statements in a coordinated effort, one after the other, on social media, saying the Minnesota Democrat should step down.

Women Democratic senators had been talking behind the scenes for at least the past week about how to deal with Franken, multiple aides told CNN. But those talks reached a tipping point Wednesday morning, they said, when Politico published a report at 9 a.m. ET of another woman alleging that Franken touched her inappropriately in 2006, before he was elected to office.

The story prompted a flurry of calls and texts between Senate offices within minutes, and it was decided sometime between then and about 10:30 a.m. ET that the women senators would go public in a show of unity with their desire for Franken to step aside.
"Their patience had worn incredibly thin," said an aide to one of the women senators.
Soon after that, Franken was given a heads up about what was coming, according to an aide to one of the women senators.

The Daily Beast article confirms this:

A spate of female Democratic senators, starting with Kirsten Gillibrand, called upon their colleague Al Franken to resign amid mounting sexual-harassment allegations against him.

Immediately after Gillibrand posted her statement, several other prominent female Democratic senators came forward to call for Franken’s exit—including Sens. Kamala Harris, Maggie Hassan, Claire McCaskill, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Baldwin, and Patty Murray.

Neither said that Gillibrand led the charge just that she was the first and was immediately followed by others in a co-ordinated effort.

Nor do any confirm that Gillibrand began any effort three weeks earlier as you claimed:

Those antecedent three weeks are when Gilibrand led the charge.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1287&pid=71332

The other two are opinion pieces, not news. But maybe you should have bothered to read the Slate article that states:

When seven women accused then–Minnesota Sen. Al Franken of sexual harassment or abuse last winter, Democrats were put in a tight spot. If they demanded Franken’s resignation for alleged acts far less severe than those the sitting president has been accused of perpetrating, they’d lose a reliably progressive—and extremely popular—women’s rights advocate in the Senate in order to claim a moral high ground the GOP has no interest in competing for. If they let Franken stay, they’d be normalizing sexual exploitation as a thing powerful men inevitably do, and any future calls they might make for alleged abusers to step down from public office could be dismissed as hollow and hypocritical.

If Gillibrand hadn’t called for Franken’s resignation, it would have been fair to label her an opportunist, because she’d have been contravening her beliefs to avoid upsetting donors and causing intraparty conflict. In that sense, accusations of opportunism from aggravated donors are self-refuting. If she was behaving disingenuously to gain support, then where’s the support?

Even if Gillibrand ends up losing more than she gains as a result of her stance, Democratic Party boosters shouldn’t be badmouthing her for spearheading the movement to hold Franken accountable. They should be thanking her for saving the Democratic Party’s reputation among young voters who have plenty of reasons to think Democrats are just as corrupt and sleazy as Republicans. Women who’ve been moved for the first time to progressive activism by the #MeToo movement and the presidency of an accused sexual abuser could easily be disillusioned by a party without principles.

All the donors directing disapproving slights at Gillibrand over the past year (“[Gillibrand] did the damage that Republicans could not do themselves”; “what she did for women in politics was dreadful”) have sidestepped one major thread of this story: sexual harassment and abuse. These are people more eager to fault a woman for opportunism—for having the audacity to lead on an issue she cares about, possibly with the hope of becoming president someday—than to take bold measures to keep alleged gropers out of public office. The Democratic donors abandoning Gillibrand accuse her of putting politics over principle, of protecting her own career at the expense of Franken’s. They’re either too stubborn or too stupid to realize that they’re guilty of a much more despicable offense: protecting party loyalty at the expense of all women.