Michelle Obama says the country is ‘not ready for a woman’ president | CNN Politics
a year ago by Optional to c/politics
It's funny, in 2015, I thought that that platform would be the only way a woman would be able to win over such a hard hurdle of all the conservative states with the electoral college we have.
The amount of people that looked past Donald Trump's flaws or embraced his hateful rhetoric, and blamed their decision on their dislike for Hillary was huge.
I didn't like her either. She wasn't my favorite candidate by a long shot, but I still can't believe our country is in a better place now than it would have been if she had won.
Also, it's hard to believe that was ten years ago. Gross.
She wasn't my favorite candidate by a long shot, but I still can't believe our country is in a better place now than it would have been if she had won.
I do, because you have to remember: Trump wasn't a one-off anomaly; he was the manifestation of deep structural issues and multiple converging crises within American society. It was a balloon that was going to inflate and inflate until it eventually popped, and if it didn't pop in 2016 it would have even harder in 2020. Hell, I could think of an even worse scenario: Trump is sidelined in the American fascist movement and a fascist that actually knows what he's doing takes his place.
In 2015, I saw Trump as the key to causing more chaos than the establishment can handle. If Hillary won (maybe in that timeline, Trump was sunk by the RNC coronating Jeb Bush as nominee, and then Bush lost the general), the rich would only get stronger, and their rise would be much more subtle than it is now. In our world, Trump doesn't hide the massive corruption he and his rich buddies are doing. In Hillary's world, the more under-the-hood corruption of the 2000s and early 2010s would have continued without anyone trying to stop them.
This may come off as a stretch, but I claim that Mamdani (nor anyone like him) wouldn't have been able to become NYC mayor in Hillary's world. He wouldn't have the support, since people in Hillary's world are even bigger sheep than the ones in ours.
On the other hand, certain policies pre-2015 might have survived. I think Roe v Wade would still be with us in Hillary's world.
Clinton stood no chance against Trump because of the large number of women voters that were never going to vote for her; not because of who she was in 2015 but because of her staying with Bill after he cheated on her.
Even the same ardent feminists that you would assume want to see a woman president more than anything still had little interest in her, in particular, being the first woman president. Too many women see her as a woman that stayed married to jackass just because of what it afforded her politically, financially, ect. Plus, they especially did not like the expectation placed on them to vote for her solely based on gender considering they viewed her as a traitor to women more broadly.
It says a lot about how hated she is by other women that a huge contingent of them voted for a serial sexual assailant rather than her
I do think there's a debate to be had as to if were in a "better place" then if Clinton had won
If she had won, we wouldn't be better off relative to 2015. We would have been in the same shit we were in 10 years ago with a housing crisis on the rise and COVID would have still happened and probably wouldn't have gone too radically differently.
Wed still have increased income inequality and we saw under Biden that the main Liberal answer to climate change is Electric Cars which net doesn't help and in fact worsens our e-waste issue.
Obviously, I don't know this is how it would have gone for sure, but the democrats really haven't given me much to believe in.
So would we have been "better off" with a dem successor compared to the 2015 status quo? No I don't think so and I think we all knew that and it doesn't inspire people to vote or participate in elections.
Would we have been better off to what we got? Yeah probably. But that's stuff we didn't completely know until hindsight kicked in. I think we all assumed he'd be a lame president and not a modern Commodus or Nero.
Now, I don't subscribe to acceleration ist views, but there is that view point as well.
Under that ideology, we are better off compared to a Clinton or Harris win because they would have subdued the flakier radical elements in society longer.
Trump being president and his flagrant disregard for our status quo system is a massive stepping stone towards a revolution of some sort to hopefully fix the problems of our 2015 society plus the additional inflated issues by Trump.
Just barely, though, and against what was at the time the worst qualified opponent in history (beat only by Trump himself in 2020 and 2024). Hillary was an awful candidate in her own right and the fact that she barely eeked out a popular vote win against Trump shows that.
I genuinely don't believe that a good, likeable, popular woman candidate who was free to campaign without the interference of the (mostly men) party's Old Guard would have no problem winning. We've got women in high offices in pretty much every other level of government. Just stop pushing out the worst, rich, pro-establishment candidates to the "progressive party" and demand a vote just because of their sex.
/rant
#relatable
Elizabeth Warren's "I think I'll have a beer" will live rent free in my head forever as the prime example of clumsy pandering.
This is exactly it
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I want to believe we could have a woman president so long as she ran on something other than being a wet noodle that's trying to be #relatable more than just being a good candidate.
Or better yet, running on something more than
"Are you really gonna let Trump win?"
save