Clinton's Last Hurrah

Hillary Clinton needed to run for President this year. It may well have been her last chance for that office. I ran across a mention of the ultimate feminist presidential race for 2012 - Hillary vs Sarah and it got me to thinking.

If Obama is elected, chances are he'll serve two terms. In that eight years, Hillary will have reached the age of sixty-nine and will likely be considered either too old or too unattractive for the office. There might even be the hint of scandal after Bill trades her in on two 35-year olds.

The chances are that this year was Hillary's last chance unless of course John McCain wins.

Palin's Legacy

It was very early this morning when I decided I couldn't sleep any more. I decided to peruse some of the blogs and the opinion pieces in newspapers, mainly from boredom, but with an eye towards getting some feel for the direction in which the presidential election is going.

In Wesley Pruden's commentary in the Washington Times, I stumbled across a quote from Gloria Steinem that caught my attention, not because of her wisdom, but because of her attempt to “expose” sexism, among other things.

"Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for - and that Barack Obama's still does."

“More than twice as many male delegates as female” - that's what did it. Wrapped up in that fragment is the idea that Republicans are a bunch of misogynists. Just imagine how many women were left at home barefoot and pregnant while the men ran the show at the convention. My sense of irony ignited and flared skyward. That group of “obviously sexist” men nominated and even wildly applauded a woman! That group deigned that a woman could be Vice President or possibly even President.

In less than a heartbeat, I realized that the Democratic convention, which I am sure had the politically correct number of men and women, had selected not one but TWO men. My ironic skyrocket exploded in a gigantic starburst.

Those same Democrats are also so quick to charge that John McCain chose Sarah Palin as a desperate political ploy to appeal to women voters and laud the fact that they nominated a woman for Vice President back in 1984. That was twenty-four years ago and one has to wonder why they haven't nominated another woman since. One also has to wonder if Geraldine Ferraro's nomination was the desperate political ploy of Walter Mondale in an attempt to defeat a very popular President Reagan. Maybe the Democrats are seeing the ghost under the bed.

Then too, maybe the Republicans are continuing a legacy. Many years ago, so many that I cannot remember the source, I heard a prediction that the first female President would be a Republican. It might have been around the time Margaret Chase Smith's name was placed in nomination for President at the 1964 Republican National Convention, the first woman to be considered by either major party. I remember initially discounting that idea. After all, the Democrats have made their women very visible, the most recent example being Hillary Clinton. But now it seems like possibly an idea whose time has come.