Democratic Primaries

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(47,472 posts) Mon Jul 1, 2019, 09:06 PM Jul 2019

Madam President? Five Candidates on What It Will Take to Shatter the Most Stubborn Glass Ceiling

A very long story in Vogue.

(snip)

And yet her (Warren) gender is a subject she and the other female candidates can’t escape. (The day before, I’d heard an MSNBC pundit declare that Warren was not a “connectable female”— which led to a panel debate titled “Can a woman beat Trump? Some Democrats wonder if it’s worth the risk.”) Perhaps that’s because they have so little else in common. The six women running for the Democratic nomination come from different backgrounds. They range in age from 70 (Warren) to 38 (Representative Tulsi Gabbard). They are lawyers and senators, professors and soldiers and even an author and spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey (Marianne Williamson). They disagree on campaign tactics and policies. I spoke to Senator Amy Klobuchar just after she came out against Warren’s plan to cancel most student debt and make tuition at public colleges free. (And don’t even get the other women started on Gabbard’s foreign-policy positions.) But they also form an unlikely sisterhood in the inspiring, baffling, often infuriating contest to defeat President Trump.

While each has so far trailed the leading male candidates—Warren and Senator Kamala Harris poll closest to the top of this group—collectively they have smashed our stubborn assumptions about powerful women and permanently changed our notion of what a presidential election looks like. For the first time, multiple women stand on the presidential-debate stages, their presence signaling to millions of Americans that the era of a dozen men—and maybe a lone woman—arguing the issues is over. (When Governor Jay Inslee touted his record on women’s rights in the first debate in Miami, Klobuchar chimed in with, “I just want to say, there’s three women up here that have fought pretty hard for a woman’s right to choose.”)

These candidates have also, inevitably, reminded us of the hurdles, bordering on bulwarks, that women at the highest level of American politics still face. To many of us, watching the 2020 race unfold has felt less like a celebration of rah-rah feminism and more like a daily, live-tweeted, televised pelting by the patriarchy. Indeed, we cannot assess any of these candidates without also assessing our own biases. Debates about who is “electable” (or not) have become a smokescreen for lingering discomfort with what we have still, after 243 years as a republic, never seen: the election of a woman president.

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https://www.vogue.com/article/democratic-women-female-candidates-interview