Daily US Times: Senator Elizabeth Warren ended her White House race on Thursday after extremely poor performance in Super Tuesday vote, leaving the only woman on the race, who by any polling metric, has virtually no chance of winning. The serious candidates all are now out of race.
Hillary Rodham Clinton created a real hope that a woman could soon be president of the United States when she announced her candidacy in 2007. She lost her race in getting the Democratic Party’s nomination to Barack Obama.
In 2016, she again announced her candidacy. This time, she got a flagrant misogynist as her opponent. This time, she managed to seal the nomination but lost the ultimate presidential election. Hillary’s loss to Donald Trump stunned and shocked many analysts. From the US to the rest of the world, people needed time to swallow the information that a person like Donald Trump is now the president of the United States!
Despite Hillary’s tragic loss, countless women ran for public office.
This time, six Democratic women step up to contend for president. For various reasons, author Marianne Williamson and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — seemed to many like longshots. But there are still four very qualified women left: Massachusetts Sen. Warren, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and California Sen. Kamala Harris.
But we are standing in a position where the chance that a woman will win the 2020 presidential race has imploded.
There is no doubt that sexism is one of the vital reasons that bring us this point, but social influences are wicked problems: they are diseases, hard to diagnose, even harder to cure.
These female candidates seemed held to a higher standard when it came to being presidential, electable and even likable. In fact, for women, those three characteristics war with one another. A woman who seems nurturing (likable) pays a steep price. Gillibrand chose to take a soft approach by wearing dresses in contrast to the suits that many other female candidates wear. She took on issues more overtly women-focused than those of her competitors.
What happened to Harris? Did her strong and bold gesture to Vice President Biden, when she confronted him, make her unlikeable? Why was she failed to gain support? Of course, she has her campaign problems, but what are the unseen force? The senator wasn’t simply a black candidate; our former president blazed that trail. She was a black woman.
As time goes, Klobuchar and Warren established themselves as presidential and powerful — far more, surely, than most men in the race. Even for the first time in history, the New York Times endorses two candidates, Warren and Klobuchar.
But since then, Warren had fallen in the polls. Some questioned her ability to compete against Donald Trump, which fuelled her electability.
In Nevada, Warren expressed her experience as a woman candidate who runs for White House: “If you complain about it, then you are whining. And if you don’t complain about it, the rest of the women think, ‘what planet are you living on?’ And so, you get caught in between the two.”
One of the serious candidates Klobuchar tried to establish that she was running on her merits, not her gender — through she would nonetheless be proud to be the first female president.
During one debate, Klobuchar mentioned the sexism in the presidential campaign. She said in reference to former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, that no female mayor of a small city would be in his position in the race.
American women gained the right to vote 100 long years ago. But it’s hard for many to fathom the fact that no woman has ever taken her seat behind the desk in the Oval Office.
Perhaps, we will see a woman vice president in this 2020 election. If this happens, that will be progress, but not the progress the nation needs for truly representative democracy.
For the sake of the future, the stage must be reset as we advance women’s political leadership at the highest levels.