What’s novel is the lack of novelty. We should be electing people because they’re the best person for the job, not because of their gender or skin color. And it looks like we might be about to do just that. That’s what’s huge.
I agree that the focus now needs to be on defeating Trump, not electing the first woman president. If/when she wins the election, that’s the time to celebrate her landmark status.
I remember a lot of people saying about Hillary “I’d love to have a female president, I just don’t want it to be her.”
If 2016 knew what 2024 knows, that orange fucker would just be an historical curiosity.
I was going to post, it is about those things to the extent that she herself deliberately pushes that spin.
Not sure to what extent the media would be leading such a push.
Breaking 200+ years of tradition, apparently
It will be a big deal when it happens, it hasn’t happened yet so it isn’t. The alternative is a much more negative outcome so that’s what everyone focuses on.
No so fast.
The general feel that I have about this election is that it is more about stopping Trump than electing Harris. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of optimism about how she will perform. This seems to be making it less significant that she is a woman and a woman of color.
Hmmmm. Let’s say Hillary had a good chance but “expected” is an overreach.
The novelty was in 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro ran as the Vice-President candidate with Walter Mondale. Also, with the number of female world leaders by 2016 the idea of a woman not named Thatcher running a country was not as absurd. I am purposely leaving out Benezir Butto and Indira Ghandi because most American have no clue who they were but if you do, it adds to “Why haven’t we had a woman President by the 21st Century?” By 2016 the idea that a Presidential candidate having to be a white male was long since gone due to Obama’s win and successful presidency.
Which is a good thing if we don’t focus on the election as, “Holy shit, a woman of color became President!” and just say Harris beat Trump.
Which is a brilliant campaign strategy. Look, no current Trump supporter is going to vote for Harris. What the Dems need to is convince the undecided to not vote for Trump and the best person to do that is Trump himself … just stay out of his way and from time-to-time add little jabs that keep him going. Taking Trump as an incumbent, psephologists would tell you that a vast majority of votes have nothing to do with the incumbent’s opponent but rather people voting for or against the incumbent themselves.
Again not a bad thing.
I still don’t understand what the problem is with that. Why does she have to be a woman President or a non-Anglo President. What’s wrong with just being President?
I will agree that it is good to not make it about “it’s time for the first ____ President”. If you’ve been looking around, there’s no mood for that.
Quite. Anyone around who was old enough and paying attention during the 70s had to be aware of at least Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Maggie Thatcher… but for a large plurality of the current eligible voters these are just names from the past at best, or even worse, “well sure, but that’s not America”.
PAKISTAN had a female leader FFS! It’s like the fact that the United States outlawed slavery after the rest of the “civilaized” world did. And we had to fight a civil war to do it.
And it makes her run a gimmick. When Ferraro ran as the first female VP candidate from a major party, everyone knew it was a gimmick Mondale came up with since there was no way he could beat Reagan. Say what you want about Hillary’s campaign, her running as a female was not a gimmick cooked up by the DNC. Harris running as Biden’s VP was not a gimmick so we shouldn’t minimize her presidential run as Oh we might get a woman president.
Because if you talk to women Americans, we don’t live in a society like that. Because if you talk to black Americans, we don’t live in a society like that. Because if you talk to Indian Americans, we don’t live in a society like that.
And especially because if you talk to conservatives, we don’t live in a society like that.
See also Jesse Jackson, who kept on running for the position of Black President of the United States, and kept on losing. Then Obama came along and ran for the position of President of the United States, and won.
There’s also the factor that Harris was a last-minute replacement for the incumbent Biden, rather than being nominated from the first as the Democratic candidate. Almost a sort of preemptive “v.p. takes over the presidency after the president dies/resigns”.
Obama is effectively what would be called a mulatto in societies that didn’t follow the USA’s “one drop of blood” rule. With a white mother and a Kenyan father he is literally an African-American; to put it crudely, none of his ancestors ever picked cotton. That made him just acceptable to enough white Americans and even then the Obamamania was severe from the get-go. An old-school “radical” African-American like Jackson was always a non-starter.
Trust me, I’ve been spouting anti-racism and especially anti-sexism here for a long time. My point was by putting a qualifier on it, it somehow minimizes the Presidency. Take Obama. He was of course a “Black” President but would you characterize his presidency by that? No, and I almost never hear him described as “Black former President” but just “former President”. So should President Harris be defined as a woman President? No, because we should be able to know she is a woman President without the label.
It’s kind of hard to explain what’s in my head. I object to using the label “woman President” to define her and somehow tokenize her.
You raise a really good point here. By electing her as VP and especially given Biden age and health, we know she could have been President at any point in the last 4 years so have we already gone through her (potentially) being a female as President 4 years ago?
Well there have been many female leaders since and currently. Heck one of them is a neighbouring country, and three are in the Caribbean.
Right; as I alluded upthread, as soon as the US does have their first female president, I think at least some will portray it as the US leading the world in feminism. Because I’ve heard plenty of people suggest that the US “showed the world that slavery was wrong”.
Without looking it up: Minnesota (Mondale’s home state) and DC (Who would vote for any Dem).
Considering that she’s been so comparatively invisible the past four years that the right is pounding that fact as part of their campaign against her, I feel that her sudden emergence as the presidential candidate was a unique reboot of her public identity.
Imagine if Truman had dropped out of the 1952 race and told the convention to nominate his VP, Alben Barkley. Who he? would likely be the response, and he had been a Senator since 1937. He wasn’t even a major candidate in the 1952 convention. (Not that he dropped out of politics: he was still popular enough in Kentucky to be re-relected to the Senate in 1954.)
The only mentions I remember about Harris the past four years were articles wondering why we never hear of anything Harris was doing. Then overnight she replaced Taylor Swift as the most-press-covered woman in America.
If she wins, that will continue to literally unprecedented heights.
Agree with this.
Definitely disagree with this. I’m seeing huge optimism.