On the Idea of a Woman as President

On Monday we ran into a young woman friend of ours who’s a staunch Democrat, and were slightly surprised to learn that she’s not running for president. We joked that pretty much every other woman who’s a staunch Democrat is in the race, as California Sen. Kamala Harris had just announced she’s joining Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Senator Kristin Gillibrand and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in the already-crowded field, but our friend didn’t think it was a joking matter.

Although our young friend is very much an I-am-woman-hear-me-roar sort of feminist, she looked around to make sure anyone else wasn’t listening and then confessed that she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of the Democrats running another woman for president. She needlessly assured us she’d dearly love to see a woman become president some day, but explained that at the moment her most pressing concern was defeating President Donald Trump in the next election, and confessed she was worried that at the present moment in the sexist United States of America any woman nominee couldn’t accomplish that.

At the risk of being accused of “mansplaining” or some other “micro aggression” against feminist sensibilities, we comforted our young that she was being an hysterical flibbertigibbet.

There are indeed plenty of sexist pigs remaining in America, and we can’t deny that the current president is one of them, but we argued that’s no reason for young feminist friend to despair. As  awful a woman as she was Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million or so and only lost the electoral vote by some 80,000 votes spread out over four key crucial states, and given that Trump’s approval ratings are even worse than when he was elected any less awful woman Clinton — a very low bar –stands as good a chance as any man of beating him after the past two years and what’s sure to come in the next two. We also noted the Kansas is by no means America’s most politically correct state, which is one of the things we love about it, yet it recently elected its third Democratic governor and rejected the Trump-endorsed white male Republican. The recently installed Democratic majority in the House of Representatives feature a record number of women, including a Native American lesbian kick boxer from right here in Kansas,  several of whom have all the media listening them to roar, and a tattooed folk-singing single mother is now our district’s Sedgwick County Commissioner, and we figure that in modern day America a woman stands as good a chance as anyone in any American election.

None of the Democratic women who have thrown their hats into the ring are to our liking, but then again neither are are any of the Democratic who figure to be in the race, and for old-fashioned Republican and conservative reasons of our own we’re eager to see a president other than that Trump fellow. Our advice to our young feminist friend was to choose whatever candidate or either sex who could win a majority of still mostly centrist America. We’re old enough to remember the election of ’72, when the crooked and unpopular Republican President Richard won a 49-state landslide because the Democrats when too far to the left, and although our young friend hadn’t been born at the time she seems to have learned the lesson, as much as she wants an eventual socialist paradise.

That Harris woman from California is way too far left for our tastes, but she’s a former tough-on-crime prosecutor and seems calmly deliberative and restrained in all her many television interviews, but that probably means she’ll seem too centrist to a lot of today’s radical Democrats, but we still think she’s a contender. That Gillibrand woman from New York was an appealing centrist when she was a congresswoman from a suburban swing district but when far left when she ran for statewide office, and will probably spend the primary race explaining away her previous and more sensible positions. Warren is running on the same platform as self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who might be campaigning on an octogenarian’s walker, and although she’s now impeccably politically correct that Gabbard woman from Hawaii has some explaining to do about past “tweets” regarding homosexuals.

We’d give all of them a fighting chance against Trump, but we told our young friend that we figure there’s better than a 50-50 chance he won’t be the nominee in 2020, and we wouldn’t be surprised if the first woman President of the United States turns out to be a Republican. Former two-term governor of South Carolina and recent United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley is young and ready, her governorships featured old-fashioned Republican fiscal rectitude and the permanent lowering of the Confederate flag from state buildings, her service in the Trump administration was marked by a more traditional foreign policy from her boss and a quiet resignation letter, and the Republicans could shake their reputation as the party of old white men by nominating a central young dark-skinned woman, and even our feminist Democratic young woman friend said she’d go along with that.

Sooner or later some white or dark-skinned woman is going to become president of the United States, and that’s fine by us, so long as she’s a good one.

— Bud Norman

Yet Another Clinton Comeback

Unless you’re the politically obsessed sort who reads such publications as The Hill, you might not have noticed that Hillary Clinton has lately been making a comeback. Although we’re usually not inclined to offer any advice to the Democratic Party, we will suggest for the sake of the rest of the country that they nip this in the bud.

Over her long career as First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State and long-presumed First Woman President of the United States, Clinton has never done much good for her party. Her dutiful performance as the wronged but loyal life wife during President Bill Clinton’s various scandals helped him end the hated Reagan-Bush era of Republican administrations, and somehow didn’t affect her reputation as a feminist heroine, but he was still hobbled enough that eight years of yet another Bush ensued. A brief tenure in the Senate seat she carpet-bagged her way into was utterly forgettable, as was the first presidential campaign she lost to a previously obscure Illinois Senator of even shorter tenure, which is more than she could say for her disastrous four years as Secretary of State, and that so weighed her down with accumulated scandals that her long presumed ascension to First Woman President was thwarted. Worse yet, as far any Democrat is concerned, it resulted in President Donald Trump.

The humiliation was such that for the past several months it has forced Clinton into political exile, reportedly wandering the woods around her upstate New York mansion, and all the political attention has been focused on Trump. So far this is working out quite well for the Democrats, with Trump’s approval ratings well underwater in every poll and all the pundits and late night comics and other Democratic partisans reveling in it, and now seems an especially impropitious time for a comeback. The only Democrats that The Hill can find to endorse the idea are the former Democratic officials who once owed their careers to the Clintons and went down with them, such as former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, while pretty much most of otherwise-divided Republican Party is still ready to join in the chants of “lock her up.”

There’s already plenty of Trump fiascos and brewing scandals to keep the partisan press and late comics busy, but that was also true throughout the campaign, and back then all the Clinton fiascos and well-established scandals were enough to at least even things out. The questions about the Clintons in general and the obnoxiousness of Hillary in particular kept the Democrats on the defensive, riled up the vast majority of Republicans enough to swallow their considerable doubts about their own candidate, and with the resulting political equation spread just right across the electoral map it got Trump elected. Since then Trump’s fiascos and brewing scandals have been judged on their own damning merits, rather in the comparison to Clinton’s, and the Democrats would be advised to keep staying the hell out of the way.

Besides, none of the Democrats we know personally or hear in the media have any lingering affection for Clinton, or even for her husband’s once beloved but now derided administration, and they all seem ready to move on to some even further-left agenda they haven’t yet settled on. Given the continuing deep and visceral hatred of pretty much all Republicans, who still have a lingering desire and plausible legal case to “lock her up,” her continued presence in the news only provides a reason to overlook the latest thing Trump has “tweeted” or failed to deliver. By the next election Clinton will be the oldest newly-inaugurated president ever, surpassing the record currently held by Trump, so she hardly seems a viable candidate even by current Democratic standards, and it’s hard to see what good she’ll do as a senior stateswoman of the party.

It’s tough to bow off the public stage, or so we’re told, but it seems the most selfless move for Clinton to make. She could devote the rest of her days to quiet and public service in atonement for her past loud years of self-enrichment, which we’re told can be quite gratifying, and it would do not only the Democrats but also the rest of us a lot of good.

— Bud Norman

The Sisterhood and Its Generation Gap

According to all the public opinion polls and press reports and other political tea leaves, former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will likely lose today’s New Hampshire primary to self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, of all people. At this point it’s apparently an acceptable part of the political vocabulary to say she’ll be “schlonged,” which seems as apt a description of any for what is being forecast, and that’s how the long-planned coronation has lately been going for the long-presumed First Woman President.

The elders of The Sisterhood are not at all pleased by any of this, of course, and we’re not entirely unsympathetic to their laments. We quite agreed when they objected that “schlonged” shouldn’t be an acceptable political part of the political vocabulary, although in our case it was because we thought it vulgar while their objections had something to do phallic privilege or cultural appropriation or something, and for that matter we often find ourselves in agreement with the elders of The Sisterhood about those tawdry hip-hop chanteuses with their “twerking” and “tweeting” and scantily clad activism, but that’s just the same shared fuddie-duddiness of us old folks. One would have a heart of stone not to feel some sympathy for any lady in distress at the sight of seeing her dream of a First Woman President dashed by the likes of a bumbling self-described socialist and Vermont Senator named Sanders, too, but our sympathy only goes so far as a freshly laundered handkerchief, a consolatory pat on the shoulder, and a little bit of “there, there.”

Such formerly formidable feminists as Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright are especially aghast that the younger of The Sisterhood are abandoning the long-awaited First Woman President for such a schlub as the self-described socialist Sanders. The once-famous journalist Steinem told an incredulous talk show host that young women were at Sanders rallies because “that’s where the boys are,” fondly recalling an old Connie Francis tune for us, and the First Woman Secretary of State Albright warned the little hussies that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” A writer for The Washington Post lamented that Clinton is a victim of sexism because Sanders’ schlubbiness gives a certain authenticity and that as a woman she isn’t allow to be as schlubby. Although we strive to not be sexist, some manly instinct still residing in our soul thinks this all goes a bit too far.

Steinem was still something of a household name back when she defended Bill Clinton against the sickening allegations of Paula Jones, writing that even if he did use his office to order a state trooper to summon a young and low-level government employee to a hotel room where he exposed himself and made a suggestive remark and then used his office to tarnish her reputation it was no reason he shouldn’t be president, and she some retained some credibility when she later wrote that an allegation Clarence Thomas might have made an off-color joke and an unwanted request for a date should disqualify him from the Supreme Court, but by now she won’t do Clinton’s wronged wife any good. Today’s young women have plenty of chances to “hook up” with bearded and disheveled and self-described socialist young men, who in most cases they won’t care what candidate she prefers, even if it’s a Republican, and few of them have ever heard of Steinem. Albright was a lousy Secretary of State, as was Clinton, and even such racist Republicans as ourselves much preferred the First Black Woman Secretary of State in between, and the worst of all might turn out to be John Kerry, who is the first White Male Secretary of State since John Foster Dulles or John Quincy Adams or one of those guys, so by now we figure that all of us can expect some special place in hell, and we don’t expect those young women at the Sanders rallies will pay her any mind. As for the idea that a woman can’t be schlubby and play in politics, the fine observer Ann Althouse suggested a look at any old video of Rep. Bella Abzug back in the ’70s glory days of The Sisterhood, which looks and sounds eerily like a Sanders rant.

At some point the elders of The Sisterhood are going to have cowgirl up and admit that at last part of the problem is that Hillary Clinton is awful and old and obviously incompetent and thoroughly corrupt and phony,and while sanders is also awful and old his incompetence isn’t yet proved and he’s untainted by all that Wall Street money the young folks so despise and he quite authentically is a full-blown crazy socialist as he describes himself, and he’s promising more free stuff than Clinton can and a full-blown bound-to-be-fun revolution to boot. The feminist cause has always been subordinated to the First Black This or First Hispanic That or stopping whatever war the left was griping about, and forced genital mutilation and honor killings of rape are always subordinate to multi-cultural tolerance, and there’s a young woman in Germany who sent out a selfie with hand-drawn offer to “Trade Rapists for Racist,” and every part of the whole leftist project has been in service of The Revolution that the schlubby Sanders somehow seems to be leading.

In all the excitement, and after more than seven desultory years of the First Black President, the next First This or First That no longer seems so motivating. Sanders would be the First Mostly Secular Yet Ethnically Jewish President, but he never mentions that, nor do his supporters in a party that no longer supports Israel and is often explicitly hostile toward Jews in general, nor do his Milton Friedman-loving and Republican opponents who are far more offended by his self-described socialism and lack of support for Israel, and it even goes unmentioned in the press. Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas could be the First Latino President, but they only allude to their immigrant roots to inoculate themselves against charges of racism for being tough on border enforcement, and their opponents insist that their Cuban heritage and all the anti-communism that implies make them not really Latino at all, even though the Laotian and Vietnamese and Chinese and other immigrants who fled communist horror are still considered Asian, and the Czechs and Poles and Hungarians are still just white people, and everyone seems to have far better reasons for liking or disliking both senators.

We’d have no problem with a theoretical First Woman President, and on many a warm spring day we have lolled on the grass and daydreamed about a Margaret Thatcher or a Golda Meir coming our to rescue, but Clinton is one of the last one hundred or so women in this populous country that we’d choose for the honor. That’s at least one thing that we and those randy young women at the Sanders rallies seem to agree on.

— Bud Norman