Women power

‘ TO EVERY little girl who dreams big, yes, you can be anything you want – even president. Tonight is for you.” This was the inspiring message which Hillary Clinton tweeted on Tuesday after racking up enough delegates in the primary elections to clinch the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

“We’ve reached a milestone,” the former first lady, New York senator and secretary of state told cheering supporters – “the first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major party’s nominee.”

And polls suggest that, come November, America’s first black president will be succeeded by its first woman president.

Both represent huge new strides forward for true equality in the world’s beacon of democracy.

Clinton’s securing of her party’s nomination – barring a very unlikely, major about-turn by delegates at the Democratic Party’s convention – does come with some regret though.

Her rival for the nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, had much to offer Americans with his campaign for greater economic equality and his claim that “the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent”.

Though these precise percentages are debatable, no one disputes that wealth and income equality in the US are huge and growing.

The consolation is that Sanders’s surprisingly strong campaign has forced Clinton to take on board some of his economic equality agenda, so it should become policy if she wins in November.

And in most ways Clinton would probably be a better president anyway as she is vastly more experienced in government, and more pragmatic.