People are really saying this?

In today's Slate, the ever-brilliant and wonderful Dahlia Lithwick has a nice piece about the doomsayers who now claim that Hillary Clinton's all-but-certain defeat in the Democratic primaries means we won't ever have a woman president in our lifetimes. Or somebody's lifetime. Maybe all of these writers are planning mass suicide or something. I don't know. The thing I find most bewildering is that there are people saying this at all; of course, Ms. Lithwick takes them all to task and points out what fools they are and why their... their--does it deserve to be called analysis?--why these articles and commentaries are full of logical hoops and faults and flaws.

When did Hillary Clinton become the acme of political womanhood? I mean, good grief: even when I still respected her, I didn't necessarily assume she was the greatest woman in the United States Of America. I'm not sure who, if anyone, I might have picked for such deification, to be honest. And at this point, after repeatedly demonstrating that she has issues with honesty, integrity, fair play and reality itself, I have to wonder why anyone would think Senator Clinton is the best her gender has to offer, much less the only thing out there. Am I the only one who reads articles like the New York Times and Washington Post pieces Ms. Lithwick so elegantly fillets and thinks of the Futurama episode "A Leela Of Her Own"?

For those of you who missed the episode or (gasp!) aren't fans of one of the best science-fiction shows and one of the best television cartoons of the past twenty years-or-so, the episode runs something like this: Leela, the one-eyed starship captain and general badass of the Planet Express delivery service, gets the opportunity to be the first female blurnsball pitcher--blurnsball being a thirtieth-century sport that combines elements of baseball, pinball, tetherball, giant-spider rodeo riding and (possibly) Calvinball. The problem is, Leela's utter lack of depth perception (one-eyed starship captain, remember?) and general incompetence as a blurnsball player means that she's a fiasco. The team owner only keeps her on the team because her career becomes a lucrative circus show that salvages the team's falling attendance--people start coming to games to watch Leela bean the crap out of some poor batter.

The episode ends--and this is where I'm really feeling the parallels to what ought to happen to Senator Clinton--with an up-and-coming female blurnsball player confronting Leela to tell her how much Leela has inspired her to play: Leela has become such an embarrassment to her entire gender that she felt obligated to try even harder just to prove that it's not women who suck, just Leela.

There will be a woman President of the United States. She won't be a chimera of the sort Times writer Kate Zernike pointedly says "doesn't exist." She may not be anyone we've ever heard of. Maybe she'll focus on her own experience instead of trying to say that her experience as an elected office-holder's wife makes her especially qualified for office for some reason. Maybe she'll be relatively honest, at least as honest as politicians get or can be; maybe she won't come off as being as opportunistic as Senator Clinton sometimes seems (take, for instance, her newfound relationship with publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, who once accused Senator Clinton and her husband of murdering Vince Foster--please). I'd love it if the first woman President is a liberal, but writers who keep making that assumption seem to be oblivious to politicians like my own state's Senator Dole. (Did you realize, incidentally, that the first woman elected to the United States House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin, was a Republican*? The first woman nominated to the United States Supreme Court? A Republican. The first woman to serve in the United States Senate, it turns out, was a Democrat--apparently she was appointed to serve and served one damn day; you know, I really, really, really hate to say it, but it may be that people who appear to be so desperate to get a woman elected to the Oval Office are looking at the wrong fucking party.)

Above and beyond anything else, the first woman President will be a leader. She won't be elected because she "deserves" it, or because she's paid her dues, or because it's just time now for a woman to be elected, already. She will be elected because she can persuade a majority of the public that they should follow her, she will be elected because we decide she's the right person to lead the American people.

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*I josh at the expense of Republicans, but Congresswoman Rankin's Wikipedia entry makes her sound unbelievably awesome and is a reminder of the fact that Republicans used to Not Suck: Congresswoman Rankin was a social worker, a suffragette, voted against American entry into World War I, was the founding vice-president of the ACLU, studied pacifism in India, protested the Vietnam War, and when she died left her property to found a scholarship fund for women with low incomes. This woman rocked.

Ms. Rankin, I think I love you.