If Women Can Lead, Why Hasn’t One Been President?
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/us/politics/will-the-us-ever-be-ready-for-a-female-president.html
Lisa Lerer and Jess Bidgood (NY Times) analyze why neither of the two women who have been nominated as their party’s presidential candidate has won. There’s a lot of liberal hand wringing in the article, but the real answer as actually quite simple. Neither Hillary Clinton in 2016 nor Kamala Harris in 2024 was a really good candidate for the presidency.
Mrs. Clinton came with a whole lot of baggage from her years as a First Lady (health care reform), the U.S. Senate, and, of course as Secretary of State (Benghazi). Then came the emails on her private server and her comments about the “deplorables,” and in general a real question about her likeability.
Ms. Harris was a put-in candidate. She failed miserably in the primary of 2020 when running on her own. She was not viewed as a particularly successful vice president under Joe Biden. And, the country clearly wanted change. The collective memory, right or wrong, was that things were better when Trump was President. Since he was the option again, he won. Thus, Donald Trump is the only person ever to defeat two women presidential candidates.
The defeats of Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Harris have very little to do with the “glass ceiling” and everything to do with Clinton running a poor campaign and Harris not being a legitimate candidate, not to mention a DEI choice of a man viewed widely as being cognitively impaired.
So, can a woman ever be President of the United States? I think the answer has to be yes, but it will take the right woman—in personality and in policy—that is the right personality and right-wing policies.
As Bill Clinton and Lindsey Graham agree, a conservative woman has a better chance. If a conservative woman candidate, presumably a Republican, would not drive off conservative voters, as Hillary and Kamala did, that woman could win.
And while we are considering the Presidency of the United States, why hasn’t there been a woman president of MD Anderson? All five people in that position have been men and two have ended their tenures on bad terms, and the current guy is heading that way. This is a decision that the Board of Regents may need to wrestle with at some time in the future, but I surely believe that if the NIH and the NCI can be led by women, surely MD Anderson can. It is not because there is a lack of candidates. There are many and some have been in the running in the past.
Recently, the BW and I made the mistake of going to see the new film Babygirl with Nicole Kidman directed by a woman, Halina Reijn. Not only is this an awful film, it is an insulting one to women. Kidman plays a successful executive with a perfect husband, house, and family who takes up with a much younger male intern in her firm who humiliates her sexually. This is one giant step back for women. It doesn’t suggest, it states directly, that even a successful woman is a victim of her own sexual urges and prone to being dominated, even by a younger man.
I have been married to a successful woman for over 52 years. I have seen all kinds of misogyny being perpetrated by men and by other women. I would have thought that a modern film about a successful women would not start with her viewing pornography and use nudity as a form of on-screen commentary about how easily she could be dominated.
The rest of the world has seen fit to raise women to leadership positions in major democracies—India, Great Britain, Israel, New Zealand, and others. I’d say that if the right woman, in the right party, at the right moment was nominated, she could win the presidency. Whether the Board of Regents of the UT System can get past its bias and realize that MD Anderson too might be better off led by a woman (how much worse could it be?), I can’t say. I hope I live to see it.
