I never would have expected in 1998 just how many of these would come to pass, how close we are on AIDs and Cancer, and that we still would not have elected a woman president
I mean, the issue with the female president thing is that people keep pushing too hard for it. At this point we’ve had multiple female vice presidential candidates, multiple female presidential candidates, and a female vice president. The Dems had a big influx of female congresspeople in the last few years, and some of the most prominant GOP voices are women. While there are still non-negligible barriers to women assuming leadership roles, there are certainly fewer than there used to be, and there is no obvious reason why a woman couldnt be president. Which is essentially what a reasonable person would want - a woman should be president because there are no female specific barriers for entering the role, and then via a normal statistical distribution, eventually one will be elected.
The problem is that the two female presidential candidates we’ve had have been bad candidates. They were establishment politicians running in an anti-establishment climate, where the Democratic party was hoping that the identity politics of running a female candidate would outweigh the unpopularity of the candidates themselves. And then when they inevitably lose, their boosters cry misogyny rather than recognizing that they simply ran a bad candidate.
We can contrast the Harris and Clinton campaigns with the Obama campaign. Obama had a popular (if fluffy) message and was a legitimately charismatic and appealing candidate from outside the party establishment. His campaign was “Hope and Change”, not “Look, he’s black! Everyone vote for him or you’re racist!” But the overemphasis on Clinton and Harris’ sex was actively off-putting to voters. Everyone can implicitly tell if you are get votes from identity politics, and they don’t like it.
I wouldn’t say people are pushing too hard for it, or that people are saying look she’s a women vote for her or you’re sexist. At least, I don’t think that was really the pitch before the election. ‘Its her turn’ was a blunder but at least the pitch I got from the campaign was largely 'Do you want Trump answering the warroom in the middle of the night or seasoned diplomat Hillary’ with a side of ‘Obama’s recovery was great, just look at the stocks’. I do agree about the two primary winners we have had though, they were not it. To avoid repeating myself too much here since I went into it in another comment, I think Hillary’s outsized party influence also fucked us by not giving us as full a complement of primary challengers as we should have had, and odds are one or more of them would be a woman who doesn’t have to dig herself out of decades of Washington insider dislike
Yeah, that’s what I mean. AIDs felt insurmountable as a disease when I was younger. You mean its an illness that just fucks up your immune system so bad almost everything can kill you?, but these days we have PREP and drugs that can push you into Untransmissable territory, which is a stunning achievement. It went from ‘I don’t know if there will ever be an answer’ to ‘the answer feels like it’s just around the corner’ in 27 years
In the years before PREP and just had the triple cocktail, I had a friend that worked in operating rooms doing liver transplants. She talked about the damage Hepatitis does to a liver (and how we simply have no way to live without a healthy liver besides transplant). She told me she’d much rather have HIV than Hepatitis.
And to your point, now we’re even have PREP. So something that was seen as a growing pandemic level death sentence is now a manageable and affordable routine. This is the wonderful power of modern medicine.
Yeah, she really did blow it. It felt like her entry into the race convinced women I would have much preferred as candidates not to enter. A lot of people don’t share my feelings about Warren in the 2020 election (mostly that her alleged betrayal is overblown, and that I thought she was the best fit as a compromise candidate between progressives and centrists), but she didn’t enter in 2016 and neither did several other high profile women, I think probably because of behind the scenes pressure from Clinton’s people in the DNC. Hell even Kamala Harris should have been in the primary in 2016. I don’t like or think either her or Warren are good people to be clear, but they’re each better than Trump or Hillary and maybe if Kamala had actually run in the 2016 primary she wouldn’t have been so bad at it by the time she was up in 2024.
Hillary’s power in the party and intimidating name recognition robbed us of a term’s worth of qualified candidates, many of them women, who didn’t want to publically go against her.
I never would have expected in 1998 just how many of these would come to pass, how close we are on AIDs and Cancer, and that we still would not have elected a woman president
I mean, the issue with the female president thing is that people keep pushing too hard for it. At this point we’ve had multiple female vice presidential candidates, multiple female presidential candidates, and a female vice president. The Dems had a big influx of female congresspeople in the last few years, and some of the most prominant GOP voices are women. While there are still non-negligible barriers to women assuming leadership roles, there are certainly fewer than there used to be, and there is no obvious reason why a woman couldnt be president. Which is essentially what a reasonable person would want - a woman should be president because there are no female specific barriers for entering the role, and then via a normal statistical distribution, eventually one will be elected.
The problem is that the two female presidential candidates we’ve had have been bad candidates. They were establishment politicians running in an anti-establishment climate, where the Democratic party was hoping that the identity politics of running a female candidate would outweigh the unpopularity of the candidates themselves. And then when they inevitably lose, their boosters cry misogyny rather than recognizing that they simply ran a bad candidate.
We can contrast the Harris and Clinton campaigns with the Obama campaign. Obama had a popular (if fluffy) message and was a legitimately charismatic and appealing candidate from outside the party establishment. His campaign was “Hope and Change”, not “Look, he’s black! Everyone vote for him or you’re racist!” But the overemphasis on Clinton and Harris’ sex was actively off-putting to voters. Everyone can implicitly tell if you are get votes from identity politics, and they don’t like it.
I wouldn’t say people are pushing too hard for it, or that people are saying look she’s a women vote for her or you’re sexist. At least, I don’t think that was really the pitch before the election. ‘Its her turn’ was a blunder but at least the pitch I got from the campaign was largely 'Do you want Trump answering the warroom in the middle of the night or seasoned diplomat Hillary’ with a side of ‘Obama’s recovery was great, just look at the stocks’. I do agree about the two primary winners we have had though, they were not it. To avoid repeating myself too much here since I went into it in another comment, I think Hillary’s outsized party influence also fucked us by not giving us as full a complement of primary challengers as we should have had, and odds are one or more of them would be a woman who doesn’t have to dig herself out of decades of Washington insider dislike
Edit: typos and styling
I mean, technically we DO have cure right now for HIV. Only 7 (maybe 8) people have had it though because the cure is worse than the disease. These folks only got the cure because they were trying to cure something worse and curing their HIV infection was just a bonus.
Yeah, that’s what I mean. AIDs felt insurmountable as a disease when I was younger. You mean its an illness that just fucks up your immune system so bad almost everything can kill you?, but these days we have PREP and drugs that can push you into Untransmissable territory, which is a stunning achievement. It went from ‘I don’t know if there will ever be an answer’ to ‘the answer feels like it’s just around the corner’ in 27 years
In the years before PREP and just had the triple cocktail, I had a friend that worked in operating rooms doing liver transplants. She talked about the damage Hepatitis does to a liver (and how we simply have no way to live without a healthy liver besides transplant). She told me she’d much rather have HIV than Hepatitis.
And to your point, now we’re even have PREP. So something that was seen as a growing pandemic level death sentence is now a manageable and affordable routine. This is the wonderful power of modern medicine.
Not having a woman president, I blame the wife of the man that Trump blew.
Yeah, she really did blow it. It felt like her entry into the race convinced women I would have much preferred as candidates not to enter. A lot of people don’t share my feelings about Warren in the 2020 election (mostly that her alleged betrayal is overblown, and that I thought she was the best fit as a compromise candidate between progressives and centrists), but she didn’t enter in 2016 and neither did several other high profile women, I think probably because of behind the scenes pressure from Clinton’s people in the DNC. Hell even Kamala Harris should have been in the primary in 2016. I don’t like or think either her or Warren are good people to be clear, but they’re each better than Trump or Hillary and maybe if Kamala had actually run in the 2016 primary she wouldn’t have been so bad at it by the time she was up in 2024.
Hillary’s power in the party and intimidating name recognition robbed us of a term’s worth of qualified candidates, many of them women, who didn’t want to publically go against her.