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One of the stranger moments in Tuesday night\u2019s Democratic Presidential debate, in Des Moines<\/a>, came during an exchange between one of the moderators, Abby Phillip, of CNN, and Senator Elizabeth Warren<\/a>, of Massachusetts. The backdrop was a dispute between Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders<\/a>, of Vermont, about what Sanders had said to Warren at a private dinner that the two of them had in December, 2018<\/a>, when both were on the verge of entering the Presidential race. On Monday, CNN ran a story, attributed to people who were \u201cfamiliar\u201d with the meeting or had spoken to Warren soon after it, claiming that Sanders had told her that a woman could not win the Presidential election.<\/p>\n That would, of course, be the kind of undermining, sexist thing that women with ambitions hear all the time. But Sanders strongly denied that he had said it. In fact, he said in a statement, it was \u201cludicrous\u201d to think that he would tell Warren such a thing; instead, the statement read, \u201cWhat I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could.\u201d (That is almost a truism.) Sanders added that it must be that \u201cstaff who weren\u2019t in the room are lying about what happened.\u201d This inference was, at least, undiplomatic and, perhaps, reckless. (There is a concurrent dispute<\/a> about whether people on Sanders\u2019s staff had coached volunteers to suggest to voters that Warren\u2019s appeal was narrow and concentrated among \u201chighly educated, more affluent people.\u201d) Warren then came out with her own statement, which included this description of what each of them had said in the December meeting: \u201cI thought a woman could win; he disagreed.\u201d Neither of them left much room for the possibility that the truth was somewhere in between, or that, for example, Sanders might have sent a message that went beyond his words.<\/p>\n Neither did CNN. Phillip simply asked Sanders, \u201cWhy did you say that?\u201d \u201cWell, as a matter of fact, I didn\u2019t say it,\u201d Sanders replied. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t want to waste a whole lot of time on this, because this is what Donald Trump and maybe some of the media want. Anybody knows me knows that it\u2019s incomprehensible that I would think that a woman cannot be President of the United States.\u201d He cited a raft of evidence, including statements he had made decades ago, his own willingness to defer to Warren if she had decided to run for the White House in 2016, and Hillary Clinton\u2019s popular-vote victory that year (when, after losing the Democratic nomination, he vigorously campaigned for her<\/a>). The expression on Warren\u2019s face as he spoke\u2014CNN went with a split screen\u2014was one of studied indifference punctuated by brief sidelong glances that seemed to convey bemusement.<\/p>\n \u201cSenator Sanders, I do want to be clear here,\u201d Phillip said. \u201cYou\u2019re saying that you never<\/em> told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election?\u201d He replied, \u201cThat is correct.\u201d Phillip, without missing a beat, said, \u201cSenator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?\u201d It was as though he hadn\u2019t denied it, or as if there were no need to grapple with a different view. The audience, anyway, laughed, and Warren, after a flash of a smile, said, \u201cI disagreed.\u201d With that, she closed the loop of a story in which her version of the meeting was an unquestioned fact.<\/p>\n It was not Warren\u2019s job, of course, to be conciliatory, when Sanders himself had said that her account was false. He might also have allowed for more ambiguity and wondered, for example, whether the effect of his words had been very different from what he\u2019d intended; he can be inflexible. At the same time, his acknowledgement that he did speak about the particular challenges a woman would face went part of the way toward a middle ground and offered Warren an opening that she shut off.<\/p>\n After noting that she wasn\u2019t there to \u201cfight with Bernie,\u201d who, she said, is a friend, Warren spoke in spirited terms about how women can and do win\u2014and ended up in another odd tiff with Sanders. \u201cSo, can a woman beat Donald Trump?\u201d Warren asked. \u201cLook at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost ten elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they\u2019ve been in are the women: Amy and me.\u201d<\/p>\n