We have two qualified women running for president; ignore the yammering about their ability to win.
Our national winnability debate is sexist and racist and reveals more about us than the quirkiness of our politics.
One sentence into this column, and I can already hear the comebacks: Winning is everything; politics is dirty work; “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”; party politics is all about winning. Yada-yada-yada.
Certainly, the political parties are all about winning, and selecting candidates they believe can win and — with any luck — coalescing around said candidates and helping them win.
But I believe there’s something else going on when we seem to be perpetually mired in a debate over whether women “can win.” Mired to the point that female candidates believe they must talk about their victories as proof that, yes, women can win elections.
For the entirety of our nation’s history, we’ve been saying that only white, Anglo-Saxon protestant men can, without question, be elected and take office. Anyone else — women, people of color, Catholics, Jews, Muslims — is suspect.
Initially, it was rigged to ensure success for white men, as they were the only ones who could vote. They gradually allowed others into the voting club, but even those changes continue to be fraught with efforts to limit voting rights.
I recall my puzzlement as an elementary school-age child over the repeated emphasis that John F. Kennedy was Catholic and, if elected, would be the first Catholic president of the United States. My best friend was Catholic, and I didn’t see much difference between her and my protestant self.
It would be years before my own reading and research uncovered the nitty-gritty details of the horrors and suspicions heaped upon Catholics, and Irish Catholics in particular. When Barack Obama won the nomination to run for president, there was not so much the JFK style oh-mygosh-he’s-Catholic as can a black man win?
So women are not the only ones stymied by our well-established WASP male patriarchy.
But with two women holding strong as we begin the primary season to select the 2020 Democratic candidate for president, that annoying “but can a woman win?” question keeps popping up.
I’ve countered men who say they’d vote for a woman if she was the “right woman” by asking if Donald Trump was the “right man” for the nation’s highest office. It’s often met with uncomfortable shrugs.
It rather feels like the annual Academy Awards night angst that accompanies the announcement of nominees for the top awards in the movie industry. By the time Oscar night rolls around, the jabs about who was overlooked — women, people of color — are ready on the tongue or tweet. Or this year, embroidered on a cape. Maybe next year.
Maybe in 2024 or 2028 on the president thing. Maybe a vice president first — a suggestion that is so sexist, it’s hard to even go there. Is that like a tryout for the job?
It’s pure wishful thinking that gender would be set aside as we study the candidates and their proposals. But maybe we could at least acknowledge our biases and not discount women merely because they are women.
Of the 12,348 individuals who have served in Congress, only 366 have been women, according to the U.S. House of Representatives History, Art and Archives website. That’s 2.9%.
The Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute of Politics has been tracking these numbers since it launched in 1971, when only 3% of Congress members were women. In 2019, 23.7% of Congress members were women.
States and municipalities aren’t much better. Denver has not had a female mayor and Colorado has not had a female governor.
The numbers are not small because women can’t win; it’s because fewer of them run for elected office. There’s a growing amount of research on the barriers and challenges women who run for office face.
But today, right now, we have two well-qualified women running for the Democratic nomination for president. Ignore the pundits yammering about who can win.
Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar are as viable as any man in the race and deserve your consideration.