FWIW, from 2003:
Wow. middleman nailed it.
I can’t believe that, in 2010, anyone would ask this question . . . especially with the word “ever.” I actually had to check the OP, thinking that it must be a zombie.
Same here. I think the answer is a clear “yes, of course.” I don’t think there is any question about it. I expect to see a woman president in my lifetime (I’m 35).
I dunno, unless the tiger on fire is wearing a leather jacket with spikes on it and can growl Highway to Hell, that candidate seems a bit effete still.
I’m noticing this a lot lately. “It’s 2010!” Did I miss something this year that’s supposed to be liberalizing everyone’s opinions?
I’ll go against the grain here – we won’t see a woman president for a long, long time. 50 years or more, and it’d require very unusual circumstances. You can find plenty of women who will explain that leaders should be men, let alone what most men think. Many countries other than the U.S. have been electing women to equivalent positions for the first time in the only the last couple of years. The rest of the world is extremely left wing compared to the U.S., so a big lag time should be expected.
Naw, at that point everyone will think he’s probably trying to make up for something.
I of course mean the tiger.
What you missed is that right-wingers don’t consider it a liberal opinion.
When it became obvious that he’d win the Republican nomination in 2008, John McCain looked around for a running mate he thought would be more popular with right-wingers; he picked one of the female Governors that Republicans had cheerfully voted into office – and he picked right, because they had no trouble rallying behind her nationally. (I note in passing that Republicans just cast their votes for three more female Governor-elects last night, doing so just as unconcernedly as ever.) Anyhow, the McCain/Palin ticket lost to the Democrat who promptly made a woman his Secretary of State; he of course replaced a Republican who’d made a woman his Secretary of State, who in turn replaced the Democrat who’d done likewise, because, honestly, neither side has a problem with that – or with putting a woman on the Supreme Court, or with voting 'em into the Senate, or the House.
I don’t think it’s a left/right issue any longer; do you have polls that say otherwise?
I agree that a poll would show a solid chunk of the population agreeing with the statement “men make better leaders” or even “men should lead” but quite a few of those people are willing to vote for a woman they agree with over a man they hate (lesser of two evils). The percentage of the population that would never vote for a woman under any circumstances has to be quite small and composed mostly very far right Christian fundamentalists who would stay home rather than vote. See women in Congress, serving as Governors, and Sarah Palin & Hillary Clinton for evidence.
Excellent points, mate.
It may well be that the first female president will be someone like Obama: a relative newcomer to the scene who fills the “none of the above” niche space in a political landscape where all the major players have too much baggage to get elected. Obama got in because the candidates who had groomed themselves for years–Clinton and McCain–were untenable to the electorate at large. The first woman to hold the oval office may well be someone who went through college on an ROTC scholarship, parlayed her service into a diplomatic posting after finishing law school, then served as a banal state attorney general which allowed her to springboard into the Senate, where she kept her nose clean and dodged nasty votes for her first term.
It sure won’t be Palin. In her short time on the national stage, she’s picked up as much baggage as Nixon was carrying in 1960.
The ‘new Nixon’ then won in '68, which suggests that in 2016 we could get the ‘new Palin.’
Except that Nixon was an exceptionally intelligent man with tremendous background and experience, as well as the credibility of having been Vice President to a man most remembered fondly. Palin has none of these things. Her popularity is essentially a knee-jerk appeal to the “just folks” elements of her party. There’s no depth there, and certainly no potential to win a national election.
September, 2016:
“One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something—a gift—after the election. A man down in Wasilla heard Todd on the radio mention the fact that our two youngest, Piper and Trig, would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little husky dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Juneau. Black and white spotted. And our little boy—Trig, the 8-year-old—named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna shoot it.”
If not for Oprah, we would have President Hillary Clinton now. The problem is the women like Clinton, Ferraro, Palin were not independent candidates.
Clinton road off her husband, Palin and Ferraro were just tokens, brought in in hopes they’d get votes. This isn’t to say tokens can’t win, they obviously do well at lower level, but they don’t rise in their own right.
There never has really been a strong woman candidate in her own right. It’ll take some time before we see that.
Part of it is child rearing. Women simply take time off of their careers. They LIKE to be with their kids and rear them. This isn’t a handicap in of itself, but it removes them from their jobs. It’s like any job you leave it for awhile, when you come back you’re farther behind then when you left.
It will happen someday but more and more people men and women, black and white and well everyone is starting to see the presidency as a “status job” and not power.
A senator with seniority or a supreme court justice can have a lot more power and influence in the long run. A 20 or 25 year stay in the senate looks better than four or eight years at the top.
Agree completely. The ranks of potential female candidates is still thinner than the ranks of potential male candidates, but the sense that no woman could win belongs to the past. Hillary Clinton could have done it. She wasn’t easy for Obama to beat and if he hadn’t, McCain wouldn’t have either.
I don’t know that Palin could pull it off but I don’t think that being female is among her top 5 barriers.
EDIT: Hillary Clinton did not ride on Bill Clinton’s coattails; if anything I think if it were not for her pushing him he would not have become President. She’s always been the one with the hunger & thirst for it.
The real question is how far are we from a black female president? There is a shortage of black women in national politics right now.
I’m with most of the posters here. A female President would not be such a novelty that it would bring shock and awe to most voters. It is just a matter of the right candidate rising through the ranks and getting the nomination and subsequent election.
You might as well ask, when will someone from Florida (or Colorado, or West Virginia) be elected President, and the answer would be the same.
If she’d had just a bit more, her husband might not have gotten in such trouble in that anteroom.
Sorry.
I think it’s well within the realm of possibility. I’d wager it’d come from the Republican side, a Condi Rice-type of candidate.
Obama won despite being black, in part, because he was lucky enough to run when the other party couldn’t win with anyone and his only real opposition was a woman. A woman could win in a similar situation, but she’d have to be lucky enough to run against someone who’d be even worse. Maybe a Muslim, an atheist, or someone who isn’t very telegenic and was only running because of seniority in the party or something.