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IS America ready for a woman or black president?

Can gender and race be non-issues as the US goes to the polls this year?

TODAY Weekend • January 5, 2008

Kenneth S Chiang

IS THE United States ready for a woman or black President?

The question doesn't necessarily go down well with some Americans. More than 87 years after the 19th Constitutional Amendment gave women nationwide the vote and 42 years since the Voting Rights Act enfranchised African-Americans, the focus this year should be elsewhere, they assert. "Did anyone ask if we were ready for a dumb President the previous election?" shot back a weblogger. The negative implication is that the US lags other democratic nations in gender equality and minority opportunity despite all its political correctness.Indeed, there are more urgent issues to debate — Iraq and Iran, sub-prime fallout and the uncertain state of the economy, the environment, health-care costs — and presidential contenders, both Democrats and Republicans, have taken on one another over these in the run-up to the primaries.

Yet, the more immediate these concerns get, the more pointed the question becomes: How effectively would a woman or black president deal with them? It is not just foreigners who are asking. Hillary Clinton fans see a pleasing omen in Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's seamless succession to her husband Nestor as Argentina's President earlier this month. A first lady can yet a president become. And the election two years ago of Evo Morales as Bolivia's — in fact, South America's — first president of indigenous descent, represents hope to some Barack Obama supporters or at least presents them an example in the same hemisphere to challenge any mainstream mindset on minority electoral chances.

The question is also subsumed for most Americans in the larger issue of "electability" at least before and in the primaries. It is asked not only of Senators Clinton and Obama, but of other candidates. So, some Democrats question if John Edwards is electable, given perceptions that he leans too much towards blue-collar and lower-income workers. And Republicans tend to look askance at Mitt Romney essentially because he is a Mormon, or consider Mike Huckabee "too liberal" to make it to the White House.

More to the point, the question is not so much "is the US ready for a woman or black President" but "do Americans see Ms Clinton or Mr Obama as presidential material?"

The specific makes it an easier query to answer than the general, beyond earlier polls that indicated a slim majority of respondents who thought the nation was prepared to see a woman or an African-American in the Oval Office.

So, to paraphrase Martin Luther King slightly, are Americans ready to judge the two senators not by their gender or "the colour of their skin but by the content of their character?"For the first time in the history of American democracy, such a question is a real one. A woman and an African- American are leading the Democratic pack according to popularity polls slightly less than a year before the election. In other words, many Democrats appear to deem both Ms Clinton and Mr Obama highly electable.

Adding to the significance of the question is the feeling that the Republican Party is less likely than in recent elections — or in comparison to the Democrats — to put up as strong a candidate from its current slate of all white front-running males (although it is, of course, too early to tell how open a field that would leave for a Democratic victory, as 10 months is a long time in presidential politics). Moreover, it is unusual that gender and ethnicity are presenting themselves as such likely choices at the same time. No woman or African-American has come on quite as strongly in a presidential bid as Ms Clinton and Mr Obama have and are likely to continue doing so next year. North Carolina Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole (wife of Senator Bob Dole and another one-time presidential hopeful) pulled out of the race in 1999 before the primaries. Former ambassador Carol Moseley Braun, an African-American Democrat, withdrew almost as early in the race, in January 2004, in support of former Vermont governor Howard Dean. It is true Mr Obama is not the first black presidential candidate, but neither Reverend Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 nor Reverend Al Sharpton in 2004 came close to being nominated by the Democratic Party. The late African-American Democratic Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm was another weak candidate, when she combined the gender and race possibilities in one person in her 1972 presidential attempt. She won only a limited number of delegates in the primaries.So, the coincidence of gender and ethnicity considerations in Ms Clinton's and Mr Obama's candidatures is quite without precedent.

Although Ms Clinton apparently turns off some voters, women as well as men, by her scripted, driven and almost supercilious style in interviews and debates, others give her credit for political intelligence, next-to-power experience and firm grasp of the issues. Matching other Democratic candidates, including Mr Obama, in the electability contest, she is likely to make a strong bid, with strategic support from husband Bill, who is presumably owed many political debts that he can call in to help her. A generously funded and well-oiled campaign machine is a huge asset, too.

Mr Obama has made something of a breakthrough with black voters, especially in the South. This is an ironic observation, for African-Americans would have been expected to form his core support. In fact he has, smartly enough, not taken them for granted and has won many over only recently from the Clinton camp. He knew he could not — and indeed is not disposed to — rely on ethnicity alone or even primarily to garner black votes, for unlike Reverend Jackson, he is neither of the civil rights era that has echoes still reverberating throughout the political base in the black church, nor does he rely on an activist or confrontational style to put across issues, no matter how right that feels to inner-city voters.

Born to a black Kenyan father and a white American mother in Hawaii, he spent his childhood there and in Jakarta, and came of age in a multi-ethnic, middle-class environment far from the ghettoes, going on to Columbia and Harvard universities. The inclusive, expressly hope-inspired manner in which he has articulated the issues has broadened his constituency among whites well beyond his home state of Illinois. And it is this success, strangely enough, that has convinced African- American voters in southern states and elsewhere to back him. In short, they are taking him more seriously than at the start of his campaign because he is electable.Like most voters, they hate to waste their vote. And they appear to be extending their support, despite his biggest obvious handicap, namely limited political experience at the national level.

So, interestingly enough, a black candidate in this particular instance has to attract black votes through first getting enough white people on board. Maybe this in itself portends America's readiness for a minority president.However he did it, to stump for him, Mr Obama has succeeded in recruiting talk show celebrity Oprah Winfrey, a child of the South, born dirt poor and old enough to remember momentous civil rights events first-hand. Her legions of fans will help cement whatever traditional African-American votes he can pry loose from Ms Clinton (passed on to her by Bill, the so-called first white "black" president).

Opinion polls in the past year may well show that around 60 per cent of respondents think Americans are ready for a woman or a black president, but it doesn't necessary mean they would elect either Ms Clinton or Mr Obama. If either is nominated by their party, there still remains the general electorate's judgment and acceptance of their platform as well as the king test of character. It is still more whether the candidate is ready for America than whether America is ready for her or him — although the latter likelihood is greater than it has ever been.

Kenneth S Chiang is a veteran freelancer writer based in the United States.