So there are 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling. And yes, Hillary Clinton is right: women are engaging in and commenting on the political process more than ever before. But where do we go from here? To misquote Phillip Vera Cruz, if not Hillary, then who? If not now, then when?
When I interviewed some high-profile feminists for Obama (Katha Pollitt, Ayelet Waldman, Ellen Bravo) earlier in the year, this question kept cropping up. All acknowledged that it would be an overwhelming achievement for women to have a female president. They just didn’t think Hillary Clinton was the best candidate for the job. So who, I asked, would be the next big thing for women? Who has what it takes to be the first woman president?
The name Kathleen Sebelius kept coming up. As the Governor of Kansas, Sebelius has had a pretty impeccable record in terms of women’s rights. Although “personally pro-life,” she’s vetoed abortion legislation in Kansas four times since 2003. Despite the fact that abortions in Kansas have declined by 7.6 percent under her governorship, Sebelius was recently touted by Robert Novak as “a pro-choicer’s dream veep.” (you know you’re headed for great things when Old Bob Novak takes a swipe at you).
Sebelius has been in the news recently as one of the top contenders for Vice-President on the Obama ticket. Washington Post even ranked her at number one. It’s easy to assume that having a woman on the ticket would be the next best gesture in terms of appeasing disgruntled Clinton supporters. However, this piece, in Slate today, disagrees. “In the fantasy baseball game know as the Veepstakes,” Christopher Beam writes, “Kathleen Sebelius appears to be the complete package…. But selecting her could backfire big time.”
According to Beam, there are four reasons why Clinton supporters won’t welcome Sebelius on the ticket.
(1) She’s Not Hillary (ie, if it’s going to be a woman, it should be the one who spent 16 months campaigning for it).
(2) She’s A Woman. And putting a woman on the ticket is a slap in the face to Hillary.
(3) She’s inexperienced, and has no foreign-policy credentials, much like Obama.
(4) Nobody has ever heard of her.
So basically, we need a woman in the White House. But only if that woman is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Otherwise, the glass ceiling can stay splintered.
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