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
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