This might strike you as a report from the Totally Obvious desk: but I’m wondering if the upcoming Democratic debates aren’t going to seriously take away some of Joe Biden’s current momentum, and result in it moving to the female candidates in the presidential primaries, particularly to Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. On the one hand, I suspect that whether or not Biden’s touchy-ness with females continues to receive coverage, or whether stories like his repeated injunction that parents to build fences around their houses to protect their teenage girls reach and offend more people, his attitude toward his female rivals will include elements of condescension and dismissal that will be illuminating for all voters, but particularly women. I think this will be doubly illuminating because the female candidates know that they must prove to voters that they’ll be able to handle Donald Trump; in this sense, Biden may serve as something of a stalking horse for the female candidates to show any voters worried about Hillary 2.0 that their fears are misplaced. The road to a female Democratic presidential candidate is going to go through Joe Biden, not simply as a fellow candidate to defeat, but as someone who I think is inevitably going to take a stance, however subtle or overt, that it’s going to take a man to defeat Donald Trump.
Farhad Manjoo, who started as more of a tech writer but whose increasing forays into politics have been deeply insightful and provocative, wrote a piece last month that makes what I’d call a strong “male case” for the necessity for electing a woman president (I say “male case” because countless women have been writing about this issue for decades). It resonated with me because I think it captures something of the humility, exhaustion, and assessment of the historical turning point that I’ve been feeling towards gender equality and what seems to have been a great leap backwards for humankind with the election of Donald Trump. The incessant electability arguments and example of the popular-vote-winning Hillary Clinton as reasons that we must once again defer a female president to the hazy future are, as Manjoo argues, just giving in to and empowering an idiot patriarchy that’s defiled the brains of both sexes for far, far too long; we assume enough people feel like a woman shouldn’t be president, so we individually give up hope, too.
Of course, it doesn’t help that our first female candidate was denied the White House by such a horrid misogynist. Anyone who expected to witness the shattering of that great glass ceiling in the sky in November 2016 ended up getting more or less the diametric opposite of what they wanted; cognitive dissonance, and an impulse toward playing it safe, was bound to ensue. But should either men or women look at the results of the 2016 election and decide that it’s time for women to back off? Or reach this conclusion after the 2018 elections, which brought record numbers of women to Congress? It makes as much sense to see so tantalizingly close a Clinton victory as inspiration for redoubled efforts, and to view the clear centrality of gender politics to the current energy in the Democratic Party as further evidence for drawing the opposite conclusion: that the story of America points to Trump’s reign being the reversible last-stand of a morally, spiritually, and politically bankrupt belief that men have a more or less divine right to lead.