Just how long do you think it will be before we get a woman president?
I know, White House-wise, you’ve got a lot of more pressing things to worry about right now. But this is the holiday season — you deserve a chance to think about a happy tomorrow.
Sure, it’s going to take a little gumption. When Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, I consoled myself by pointing out, about 20 times a day, that she won the popular vote. No such luck this time around: Kamala Harris got creamed. Nearly half of the women voted for Trump. Polls showed that a number of them voted to keep abortion legal in their state but elect a president who brags about having set up the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.
Stop for a moment if you feel inclined to indulge in a deep moan.
Pretty much everyone agrees that the cost of living was the election’s big driving factor. And that Joe Biden’s dithering kept the Democrats from having much-needed primaries to test all the possible candidates — and give them some experience in a national campaign.
Still, it’s hard to believe the anti-woman angle wasn’t important.
I dunno, people. It’s easy to fall into a deep funk. Eight years ago, I wrote an advance piece celebrating the election of Hillary Clinton, so it’d be all ready when the big day arose. Didn’t work out. But it looked as if things were really coming around this year. Just before the election, I happily wrote a column celebrating “how relatively normal” the nomination of Kamala Harris seemed. The woman-president thing hardly came up, except in celebratory tones. The tide was turning, right?
Well, not necessarily. Here we are, still wondering if we’ll ever see a woman running the country.
“How long have we been asking this?” Gloria Steinem wondered. Like many leaders of movements for reform and major-league change, Steinem always has some examples of triumph to refer to in times of despair. When we talked after Harris lost, she recalled stories she’d heard about Native American tribes in which “the grandmothers choose the chief and can depose him.”
Grandmothers of America, see if you can get together and take that up.
Until then, this is a good time to remember that thanks to people like Steinem, first-modern-woman-to-seek the Democratic nomination Shirley Chisholm, and an endless line of heroines from our recent past, we have come a long, long way from the olden days when 19th-century ladies magazines defined the differences between the sexes like this: “Man is strong — woman is beautiful. Man is daring and confident — woman is diffident and unassuming. Man is great in action — women in suffering.”
Yeah, we’ve come a long way. But not to the presidency.
Why not? What went wrong this time around? Several possible options when you’re mulling. One is to blame Joe Biden. Really, if he hadn’t hung on for so long …
Another is to blame the Electoral College. Always a pleasure to blame the Electoral College. But Harris only got a little more than 48 percent of the popular vote, compared with Trump’s nearly 50 percent.
Cannot help, people, from believing that this also had to do with race. I know we elected Barack Obama twice, but if we can’t rise up above race once and for all, it’s hard to believe we’ll ever be a country capable of making grand, inclusive decisions like electing a woman as president.
On the more positive side — and wow, hard to think of this as a positive — Harris didn’t run a great campaign. Most critically, she seemed to miss the centrality of America’s economic woes. Which left even many of her supporters a little less-than-wildly-enthusiastic.
“I’ll never vote for another person who doesn’t seriously want to raise the minimum wage,” said my friend Bill Curry, who once lost an election for Congress to a woman but continues to be a champion of sexual equality in politics.
OK, it’s over. Moving forward.
The woman-president thing is more than just a check mark on the feminist to-do list. It really would mark a transformation. We’ve grown quite used to powerful female leaders in Congress — thinking of you, Nancy Pelosi. And in business, education, finance. But the country has yet to really envision a woman in the biggest job of all, who’s living in the White House in charge of something other than entertaining visiting foreign dignitaries.
Look through world history and you’ll see precious few female heads of state. Eliminate the ones who got the job because their husband/father died/went to jail and you’re down to a handful. Who were often conservatives like Margaret Thatcher of Britain, avenging angel against the welfare state.
But things are changing — in some places. Consider Mexico, which has been working on gender equality for decades. Thirty years ago Mexico’s congress had very few female members; today the division is about 50-50. And Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, vowed in her inaugural speech, “It’s time for women.”
Time for a woman here to be elected president? “I’m not at all worried it will never happen,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics.
But … soon? Within the baby boom generation’s lifetime? Gen Z’s?
“I don’t know,” Walsh admitted.
There are certainly possibilities. For instance, next year we’ll have 13 female governors — obviously not a terrific number but growing all the time. Whenever talk about the next Democratic presidential nominee comes up, one name that almost inevitably gets mentioned is Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.
Whitmer’s staff said she was unavailable for even a quick interview on this issue: Do you think she’s trying to keep a low profile for a year or two or three? We’ve also got 25 women in the U.S. Senate, a number that would be super except for the fact that there are 75 men.
There’s a lot of work to be done — um, obviously. Hard to even keep track of all the Trump nominations that are stumbling over some allegation of sexual misbehavior. Pete Hegseth, a Fox TV host nominated for secretary of defense, had a lot of time to voice opinions on the air, not to mention a book or two. So we know he feels that making diversity a goal in the military is “a bunch of garbage” and that women aren’t really qualified for combat roles. Should be enough, but all the controversy over Hegseth has been sort of diverted by the discovery that he recently paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault. He has denied the assault claim and was never charged with a crime.
Deep breath, feel free to take a while to recover. Visit friends who have new hobbies or new children or home renovations or anything that’s an improvement and apolitical.
Then we’ll rally round. When’s the deadline? How about after Thanksgiving? Then you start looking for a new project — something about change for the better, whether it’s feeding hungry children overseas or neighborhood sidewalk repairs. Truly, anything that works for you.
Then, after a few months, the sight of President Donald Trump on TV will trigger an urge to fight back rather than a sudden desire to lay your head on the table. We’ll look to the future, reorganize and start wondering again when the inevitable will occur, and we’ll celebrate the inauguration of a female commander in chief.
