By Pamela Paul
“Aren’t you thrilled to see a woman running for president? Isn’t it great?”
Like many women, I’ve faced variations on this question multiple times since Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee. I know I’m supposed to say “Yes!” and to possibly add “Yay!”
But I don’t particularly care that the Democratic candidate is a woman. I care about having the best, most electable Democratic candidate possible, and I suspect many Americans, male and female, feel the same. As my colleague Jeremy Peters reported last week, voters are looking for electability, not representation. “In interviews, Harris supporters of all races said they were concerned that if she talked more directly about her race, she risked feeding the backlash that has been building over diversity,” he wrote.
The year 2020, in other words, is as over as 2016.
If President Joe Biden had pulled out of the race months ago, other candidates, male and female, could have made a case for their qualifications and electability and maybe had a better shot at the presidency. As groovy as the vibe feels right now, all the memes and Zooms in the world can’t cover for Harris’ weaknesses or less than overwhelming vice-presidential record. Nor will promoting her as possibly the first woman president do anything substantive to help her win.
Most Americans don’t put nearly as much importance on identity as Democratic leaders seem to think they do. According to Pew, 64% of Americans — and 57% of women, even 43% of Democrats — said electing a female president during their lifetime was not important or didn’t matter. Rather than focusing on what Harris means to women, South Asian Americans or Black people, we should focus on what she might mean to all Americans.
Donald Trump may be the latest in a long line of male presidential candidates, but I don’t oppose him because he’s a man; I oppose him because he is a terrible candidate, a catastrophic leader and a terrible human being, one who treats women (and men) horribly.
Similarly, women didn’t necessarily vote for Hillary Clinton because of her sex. And despite efforts to make gender central to her campaign, women didn’t turn out for her in the same force as pollsters predicted. “I’m Not With Her: Why Women Are Wary of Hillary Clinton” ran a headline in The Guardian months before the election.
Younger women may be even more averse to judging candidates on their sex. As CNN noted back in 2016, “Millennial women often rejected the notion that gender should be a factor in their vote, particularly if their loyalties lay with Clinton’s primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.”
Yet if Harris loses the election in November, you can bet the headlines and think pieces will come to a conclusion similar to that after Clinton’s loss in 2016, especially if we continue to double down on identity. “America Was Never Ready for a Woman President,” read a headline in Quartz back in the day. The narrative will be first Clinton, now Harris.
That’s not the real history. “The root cause of this injustice, many have suggested, can only be sexism — proof that the glass ceiling protecting the highest reaches of power cannot yet be shattered,” Naomi Klein wrote in The New York Times after Clinton’s defeat. “The reaction is understandable.” But, she explained, “it’s also wrong and unnecessarily demoralizing.”
The fact is, Klein pointed out, Clinton was a polarizing figure and a flawed candidate who ran a terrible campaign. But chalking everything up to gender wouldn’t end even with a successful election. Should Harris become president and be unsuccessful or not as successful as Biden or Barack Obama, some Americans would undoubtedly conclude that women aren’t as good as men at being president and would be loath to make that “mistake” again. Electing Harris as a woman risks any potential failure being framed as the failure of all women.
I hope Harris is elected and succeeds mightily not as an emblem or a representative and not based on essentialist or identitarian terms but simply on the merits — and that’s on her to prove. Whether she wins or loses, fails or excels, she should be judged based on what she does, not on which box she checks.
So please, stop all the talk of breaking barriers and glass ceilings, of which group is somehow categorically represented by a single human being and which isn’t and instead talk about the candidates’ qualities. A good president represents all Americans, regardless of his or her own identity.
To those who insist on focusing on sex this election, home in instead on Trump’s contempt for members of the opposite sex. That alone — leaving aside his atrocious record and stance on nearly every policy issue — should be reason for his defeat.
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