The Democrats Have Never Nominated a Woman for President

The Democrats have never nominated a woman for President. 

I'll say it again: The Democrats have never nominated a woman for President!

I repeat!  The Democrats have never nominated a woman for President!

So what about Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris?  What, you actually think rank-and-file Democratic primary voters chose them?  You're kidding, right?

Harris's nomination is easy to explain.  When President Biden decided in July 2024 not to stand for re-election - a decision he should have made in March 2023 - the Democrats needed a new candidate and Kamala Harris was the obvious choice, she being the Vice President and all.  She won the nomination on the first ballot at the convention, all right - which was pretty easy for her since she had no opposition on that ballot - but she became the first Democratic presidential candidate since Hubert Humphrey to win it without having competed in a single primary.  And she suffered Humphrey's fate in the general election.

As for Hillary Clinton . . . well - need I remind you that she had the Democratic establishment so much behind her that the Democratic National Committee protected her from challengers like Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders by setting up debate schedules and rules of engagement that tipped the scales in her favor, although Bernie Sanders came close to defeating her at times?  As with Harris eight years later, Hillary Clinton wasn't so much nominated as she was selected.  Everything was fixed for her from the start, and it gave some credence to Donald Trump's complaints that the system of choosing a President is rigged . . . which he now feels gives him carte blanche to rig it in his own favor.  Now there's irony for you.

Truth be told, the Democrats have always done better when they have a candidate who is not a establishmentarian choice but is instead the product of a grass-roots movement.  Just look at John F. Kennedy in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Barack Obama in 2008.   The conventional wisdom is that Joe Biden was nominated in a fair and open contest without any input from the DNC once he gained traction in South Carolina in the 2020 primaries and wrapped things up just in time before the COVID pandemic set in.  It's more complicated than that, as I've explained before, but if the result was that Biden was able to defeat Trump and give us four years of government for the people, I'm not going to re-litigate it.  Suffice it to say that neither Hillary Clinton nor Kamala Harris could ever be President because they were chosen by a select group of party insiders who underestimated the Republican opposition.  If we see a female President in our lifetimes, she will be a Democrat, but she has to be a candidate who defeats the party establishment like Kennedy, Carter and Obama did.  She has to be a woman of the people.

Only trouble is, there are no obvious female candidates for 2028, assuming the Democratic Party is not banned under martial law (coming to a city near you!) by then.  Elizabeth Warren is too old, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is too young, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger first have to win their respective gubernatorial elections (and I have doubts about Sherrill, for reasons I will revisit on this blog soon), Kirsten Gillibrand, a Generation X elder like myself, is too self-righteous, and Gretchen Whitmer is too busy hiding her face in a binder when Trump is around.  (She should consider joining ICE after she leaves the Michigan governorship if she wants to stay masked and anonymous.)

As the old Mary Poppins song goes, she must be kind, she must be witty, very sweet, and yes, very pretty - a female Gavin Newsom, a polished and attractive politician who looks like an anchorwoman on the local TV news, so long as it isn't Kirsten Gillibrand.  She must be able to relate to people and connect with voters, as well as talk in plain, simple and direct English - and, if she's fluent in it, plain, simple and direct Spanish, when she's campaigning in Hispanic areas.  

And there's one other quality she must share with her male competition - she must be white and Protestant.  After the debacle of trying to elect a half-black, half-South Asian woman married to a Jew, just electing a woman who's more of a so-called "real American" is going to be a heavy lift.