Duh!

Yesterday (Tuesday) there was an article in the news: 'Bill Clinton suggests US is more likely to elect female president if candidate is Republican'. Bill Clinton basically said that the first woman elected would probably be from the right wing. I wanna tell him all the upper ranks of his party are center or right-wing too. Hah.

The thing is, I've known this little truth for a long, long time. In English type countries, like America, Canada, Australia, UK (not New Zealand, go New Zealand!) the dislike isn't really over gender, it's over politics, and maybe over the way the person running for high office rose into their role in those politics. Electing a right-wing woman is easier than electing a supposed left-wing woman, especially if the right-wing woman has a political history of her own and is not riffing off that of her husband. An example: Thatcher (whom I despised), in the UK, had her own political history. She wasn't there because of who her husband was and the positions he'd 'served' in.

NOT her husband, but close enough, heh. (from the Washington Times)

In the USA who is offered for election has to do with who gets media attention, how that person is presented by their party, and also, the life history (to a certain extent) of the person offered. Of the two females offered by the Dems, #1 was the wife of a former president (Clinton), and that sure seemed to be one of her major good points. Yes, she served as Sec of State under Obama but... was she good at it? Did she do things people cared about? How many former Sec of States get elected pres? Ohh, 7, and the last one was Buchanan in the 1840s! #2 was some lady who was a not much liked attorney general for CA for a few years. She served as vice president after getting no votes and no approval from the common people in the 2020 primaries. She was foisted on those people as a presidential candidate for the Democrats by the powers that be without even the slighted hint of having to gain approval from the hoi polloi.

Could the Dems pick a woman to run who is not obviously just a puppet? Who has some ideas and principles of her own and can talk about them? Who did not get into her position by marriage? Who has a fairly favorable history? That might work, even if she is a 'lefty'. The right wing seems to have done that, at least in the case of Thatcher.

As a side note, I lived in the UK during some of the Thatcher years. It was, where I was living (the Northeast), bleak. I returned to the UK soon after 'we' elected Bush. He was visiting England and was slated to take a much ballyhooed walk along the beach in the northern part of the country. A fellow student of mine got angry at me for electing such a *ss - since I must have done so since I was a Yank. I told her I hadn't voted for him, and asked her if she had voted for Thatcher. I knew she hadn't, few in the Northeast had. She got really quiet, her eyes widened and she mouthed 'ohh', hugged me and never bothered me about that again.

Thanks for reading. Keep on keeping on. Here's the open thread - remember, everything is interesting if you dive deep enough, so tell us about where you're diving!