So, about the woman thing.
I cannot stop thinking, as Kamala Harris nears Election Day, that eight years ago I wrote an essay for a special section we had prepared for Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, celebrating the “amazing moment” when Americans elected their first female president.
Well, it lives on in the archives.
“Hillary Clinton is our next president. How do you think the founding mothers would feel if they heard the news?” I asked readers. Not surprising that I imagined she’d win — Clinton did get almost 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump, but we are not gonna whine about the Electoral College right now.
Not here, anyway. Feel free to do it with your friends on Tuesday as you wait for the returns, which, of course, may be returning for a while.
In retrospect, it seems as if Hillary was the perfect first-serious-female-presidential nominee. Big leap in a country that only had 104 women in its 535-person Congress. For quite a while in our history, the best chance for a woman to get elected to any serious office was by being married to her predecessor. Truly. The Los Angeles Times once did a study that showed that among the first-time House candidates between 1916 and 1993, 84 percent of the widows won — compared with 14 percent of the other women.
There’s very good reason for sane people to feel nervous about Tuesday. Back on the night of the Clinton-Trump contest, I left work to go for a walk while the votes were still being counted. I ran into female friends who were going off to hold a small election-watching party with their daughters. A night to remember — and it sure was. She lost, oh my Lord, to Donald Trump, the worst possible image of a male politician since — oh, I don’t know, Attila the Hun?
Not going to do any predicting today. I guess praying is OK if you want to take a minute.
One of the amazing things about this election — besides that this is only the second time a woman has ever been one of the two major nominees — is how relatively normal that part seems. “First woman” is maybe not so much the center of the story as the vast difference between the sexes when it comes to their voting plans. Women generally like Harris and men like Trump. And while there’s been an election gender gap for some time, this year it’s more like a gender chasm — the biggest division, maybe, since women first won the right to vote in 1920.
Fortunately, women’s turnout is higher. Men, this is not a slam on you — just an encouragement to some of you to rethink your candidate choice on the way to the polls.
There are other differences between the candidates, of course. Only one frequently appears certifiably crazy, or at least a tad … off. Hard to remember that people moaned so much about Joe Biden being 81, yet many of these same people seem to be able to overlook the fact that if Trump wins, he’ll still be president at 82.
Kamala Harris definitely represents the youth movement in American politics. “I’m loving that at 60 she’s now a young woman,” Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women and Politics told me, laughing.
The division between the candidates is so vast. It can be hard to tell how much of this is just because Trump is the Republican nominee. We’re living in a political world that feels like a bad reality TV show. And the Republican Party in general has fallen into Chauvinism Central — of the 256 women nominated for the House this year, 191 are Democrats.
You very possibly heard that Tucker Carlson recently predicted, with some euphoria, that Trump would be like a stern dad who would tell the country: ”You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.” Not to be outdone, Trump assured us that he was going to protect women “whether the women like it or not.”
OK, block that out of your mind. Let’s think positively. Celebrate, for instance, the fact that Harris has evolved into a very good candidate. “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy,” she keeps saying. “He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.”
I know, I know. Running against Trump is a challenge deeply different from running against a normal human being or even a normal politician. Still, she’s doing a good job. She’s courting male voters with promises to build the “most lethal fighting force in the world,” and if you don’t find that enthralling, remember that her opponent seems to love bombs and hate nuclear treaties.
Abortion is turning out to be one of the biggest issues of the election, and Harris is very strong on women’s right to control their own bodies — way more confident delivering the message than Joe Biden, the ambivalent Catholic, was. And incomparably better than Trump, who was thrilled, early in his political career, to discover how excited religious conservatives were if you gave them an anti-abortion speech. This was followed, of course, by his three — count ’em, three — right-wing Supreme Court nominees, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, his discovery that even many Republican voters favored choice, and then the development of a figure-it-out-for-yourself message that even JD Vance seems to find puzzling.
Now we’re looking at the possibility of an incredible moment in American history and we’ve got to give credit to the women who went before. I have to admit that Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic Convention wasn’t exactly a stemwinder, but it was still lovely to see her there, getting some of her due. And useful, at least, to hear Clinton say that the moral of her own political story was that “progress is possible but not guaranteed.”
That caused me to remember the grand movement for women’s suffrage. It got us here today, even though the first time the female half of the electorate went to the polls, they joined their male relatives in electing Warren Harding president.
Yeah, Harding was terrible, and he had his own hush-money scandals. But he never threatened to arrest all his political opponents. Or celebrated a famous golfer’s genitalia. Or painted immigrants as a throng of drug dealers and rapists, with “good people” occasionally mixed in. Or was convicted of crimes.
Trump is probably history’s presidential sex scandal leader. Sure, there have been other guys in the White House who had, um, strayed. But they managed to do it in a less grisly way. “Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign,” Trump assured his supporters in 2016. “Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.”
Tick. Tock.
Not only are women more likely to turn out to vote than men, they are much more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate. There’s really no more appropriate time to have a female presidential nominee. But men, I don’t want you to feel threatened by this. We just need to all work together to give boys better role models than the monarch of Mar-a-Lago, so that sometime we may be able to rally around a qualified male presidential contender.
Tee-hee. Sorry, just really enjoyed turning that one around for a minute.
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