Does America care that it is once again on the cusp of voting for its first female president? So confident was Hillary Clinton at the DNC in 2016 that she appeared triumphantly on screen to images of breaking glass. She failed to shatter that glass ceiling eight years ago, but it’s still one of her favourite metaphors. In Chicago, though, she was pretty much the only one to wheel it out. Significant in its absence, there has been precious little mention of the fact that Kamala Harris is a woman.
Even last night, in her acceptance speech, Harris chose not to play that card. Instead she accepted “on behalf of the people, on behalf of every American, regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks”. She talked about her life story, dipping into personal anecdotes, building to a pointed but carefully vague overview of her policy plans. And she talked in muscular fashion about her record on crime and drug cartels and predators. In her own way, she tried to be soft but firm.
The starkest statement about Harris’s gender over the week was a wordless one, on Thursday, when female delegates wore white as a nod to the suffragette movement. Their outfits dotted the audience but their silence was deafening. Even the New York Times noticed the messaging gulf on Thursday, describing Clinton-style rhetoric about historic firsts as “somewhat dated”. Clinton made gender central to her campaign message. Harris let surrogates and supporters “point out the obvious”.
The Democrats seem to have absorbed a genuine lesson from Clinton’s loss, and it’s not that America is teeming with irredeemable misogynists. It’s just that perhaps voters don’t really care.
While a few other speakers over the week referred to Harris becoming the first female president, it was in the context of her becoming the first non-white female president — and mostly in passing. We heard personal stories about the Vice President as a loving step-mother and a wife, as a daughter and a sister. It’s not as though Harris’s womanhood is being ignored by the campaign; it’s that her womanhood is not being treated as an important pitch to voters. This is post-woke America. Pronouns don’t matter.
Polling tells an interesting story. As The Hill reported: “Since 2015, the number of Americans who say they are ready for a female president has dropped by nine points.” That same poll found only 30% of American voters say they aren’t “ready for a female president”. A clear majority, 54%, say they are.
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