A Brief History
On March 7, 2020, the media is abuzz with whining and blaming about the fact that Senator Elizabeth Warren has dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination for President. Multiple sources cry about the “fact” that there are only men left in the Democratic race. Not true! Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is often overlooked as being a woman in the race, and a woman with an ethnic background more than just White European. Why is she being ignored? She has participated in some debating and has earned at least 2 committed delegates so far and has pointedly NOT withdrawn her campaign. Hand wringing aside, let us take a closer look at the 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination as President.
Digging Deeper
Besides Tulsi being one of our favorite candidates out of the enormous Democratic field that we started with (see our previous articles that mention her), there is the fact that Hillary Clinton gathered almost 3 million more popular votes than Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election, so it is obvious that a woman can certainly win the Presidency, just perhaps not Elizabeth Warren!
Those that call Warren “the most qualified candidate” are either being disingenuous or just wrong. Joe Biden is a lifelong Democrat and spent 8 years as Vice President of the United States and served from 1973 until 2009 in the US Senate. Please recall that while Biden was fighting for the Democratic platform, Warren was a “Reagan Republican” until her 40’s! As recently as 1992 she was still undecided about whether or not she supported the Democratic Party or the Republican Party and in fact was a registered Republican until at least 1996. Joe Biden had already been a Democratic Senator for 23 years by then! Bernie Sanders has been a US Senator since 2007, and prior to that served in the US House of Representatives from 1991 until his election to the Senate. Prior to that he was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, the largest city in the state, from 1981 until 1989. Compare these resumes with Warren’s…
President Obama created a new position for Warren in 2010, as an advisor to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She only held that job for one year, becoming a US Senator from Massachusetts in 2013, an office she still holds. Her background in claiming not just trace amounts but majority Native American ethnicity on school and job applications has cast a poor light on her credibility. In response to criticism for this misleading claim that she swears had no bearing in her being accepted to school or being hired (Baloney!), she had a private DNA test done that indicated she might be a tiny percentage Native American, perhaps as little as 1/1000th. Before public office, Warren was a law professor, a post she got after checking “Native American” for her ethnicity, although she and Harvard both claim it had nothing to do with her being hired, although Harvard proudly bragged of their “first Native American faculty member.”
We have pointed out the successes by women on numerous occasions on this website including offering the opinion that a woman could definitely serve as a qualified and successful President of the United States, and will continue to extol the accomplishments of women and girls whenever they deserve the credit. Warren is blaming everyone but herself for her failed Presidential campaign, never taking the time to reckon that perhaps her Republican past and her disingenuous claims of being Native American (claiming it as her primary ethnicity) hurts her politically. In Massachusetts, a state that elected her to the Senate twice, she was only able to finish 3rd in the Democratic primary on Super Tuesday. We seriously doubt if that is because of gender bias.
Just as every man is not fit to be the President of the United States, neither is every woman. Some men are qualified and fit for the office, and so are some women. To lose sight of this basic fact is ridiculous. Male and female candidates have flaws. It is not sexist to point out those flaws. It IS sexist to only point out flaws for one gender or the other, or to ignore the flaws for only one gender.
Could or should a woman be President of the United States? Heck yeah, and just look to Germany’s Angela Merkel or Britain’s Margaret Thatcher for proof. Or Israel’s Golda Meir. Or Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto. Or India’s Indira Gandhi. Catherine the Great and Queen Elizabeth I would take a dim view of those that think a woman is somehow incapable of leading a country, and so would we. Just not Elizabeth Warren, at least not this year.
Question for students (and subscribers): Which woman would you like to see as President of the US? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Nelson, Alan. How to Bring Out the Leader in Your Daughter: SheLead: Growing Great Female Leaders. CreateSpace, 2014.
Valerio, Anna Marie. Developing Women Leaders. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
The featured image in this article, an image by DonkeyHotey of Democratic Primary Debate Participants on June 26, 2019, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. This image was originally posted to Flickr by DonkeyHotey at https://flickr.com/photos/47422005@N04/48077109637. It was reviewed on by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-sa-2.0. Dr. Zar edited the original image to add a blue circle around Tulsi Gabbard’s image, as she is the remaining notable woman candidate still running for US president as of the time of this article’s publication.
