Wrong, Michelle Obama. Of course America's ready for a woman president

Article Tools

Contact The Editor Articles By This Author

I've never had any particular interest in women's fashion trends. Like professional sports, heavy-metal bands, and superhero movie franchises, it's a subject that I know millions of people find fascinating but has never really appealed to me. Under normal circumstances, therefore, the release of former first lady Michelle Obama's new book about the "beauty and intrigue of fashion" and the evolution of her clothing style — a coffee table volume titled "The Look" — wouldn't have registered on my radar.

But something Obama said while publicizing the book caught even my attention.

Asked during an on-stage interview last week about first ladies being seen as "an archetype of wifedom and femininity," Obama briskly dismissed the notion, saying it has "no current status in how women actually show up in the world today." But a follow up question about how much "room" there is for an American woman to become president triggered a heated response:

"Well, as we saw in the past election, sadly, we ain't ready," Obama said. "That's why I'm, like, don't even look at me about running, because you all are lying. You're not ready for a woman. You are not! So don't waste my time! You know, we've got a lot of growing up to do, and there's still, sadly, a lot of men who do not feel like they can be led by a woman, and we saw it."

Then, seeming to catch herself, Obama paused, looked at the interviewer, and asked: "What was the question?"

Obama's vehement words drew plenty of notice. They should also draw scrutiny, because the charge is plainly untrue. The assertion that Americans are "not ready" to elect a woman president is empirically false, historically shallow, and civically corrosive. The studio audience applauded her outburst — but it amounted to nothing more than grievance politics masquerading as social insight.

To begin with, the former first lady's claim is flatly contradicted by the data.

For nearly a century, Gallup has been asking Americans a straightforward question: If your party nominated a generally well-qualified woman for president, would you vote for her? There was a time when no more than 33 percent of respondents would say yes. But that figure has been above 90 percent for the past quarter-century. According to the most recent survey, 94 percent of Americans say they would vote for a woman nominated by their party. In a country that can't achieve 94 percent agreement on whether water is wet, that's about as unanimous as self-government ever gets. And the consensus is nonpartisan: Overwhelming majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike express support for electing a woman to the White House.

Obama claims that Americans are "lying" about being ready to elect a woman as the nation's chief executive. But the people who actually do the voting are better judges of their own intentions than a former first lady on a book tour. And their actual voting record, in one race after another, tells a very different story.

Americans elect women all the time. They elect them as governors and as mayors. They elect them to Congress and to state legislatures. They elect them to be judges and treasurers and attorneys general and city councilors. Women in the United States today are entrusted with power in virtually every realm of civic life. They run Fortune 500 companies and Ivy League universities; they become Supreme Court justices and chiefs of police and newspaper editors and Cabinet secretaries. The notion that American voters "ain't ready" to send one of them to the Oval Office defies elementary logic.

Then there are the presidential races themselves. If Obama's claim is that Americans simply aren't willing to "be led by a woman," how does she account for what voters have actually done in recent elections?

When Hillary Clinton ran for president, she won the votes of 65.8 million Americans — nearly 3 million more than Donald Trump. Last November, Kamala Harris attracted 75 million votes, more than Trump received in either 2016 or 2020. Neither Clinton nor Harris prevailed in the Electoral College, which is where presidential elections are ultimately decided. But as evidence of whether Americans are prepared to cast a ballot for a female president, the popular vote in the first two elections that featured a woman at the top of a major-party ticket is hard to improve on.

Clinton and Harris didn't lose because America wasn't "ready" to see a woman become commander-in-chief. They lost for the same reason every unsuccessful presidential candidate loses: They failed to persuade enough voters in the right places. That's how democratic elections work: Candidates compete, voters judge, and the loser concedes. The search for deeper cosmic explanations is almost always an exercise in excuse-making or blame-shifting.

And therein lies the larger problem with claims like Obama's: They recast electoral defeat as evidence not of a candidate's shortcomings but of the electorate's supposed failings.

When Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, she ascribed her defeat to "sexism and misogyny" and even suggested that too many women had buckled under "tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl.'" When Harris lost last year, many of her supporters struck the same note. "Few Democrats dispute that sexism was a factor," The New York Times intoned in December, adding that some Democrats want their party to avoid nominating a woman in 2028 because of "the enduring hold of sexism on the American electorate."

Meanwhile, when Trump lost in 2020, he chose an even more destructive path, launching a relentless and wholly dishonest campaign to discredit an election whose outcome was clear — a campaign his loyalists quickly echoed with cries that the vote had been "rigged" and "stolen."

Is there any meaningful moral difference between claiming Americans rejected Clinton or Harris because voters are too sexist to think straight, and claiming they rejected Trump because the election was stolen through a vast Deep State conspiracy? The grievances differ in content — sexism is not election fraud, and Trump's assault on the integrity of the election was shocking in its brazenness and scope — but the underlying posture is strikingly similar.

Both insist that the voters' decision cannot be legitimate. Both blame the public rather than examining the candidate. Both absolve partisans and indict the electorate. Both corrode confidence in election results. And both hiss the same message: My side couldn't have lost fairly.

No democracy in the world can remain healthy if its citizens are taught to believe that electoral defeat is always proof of national failure.

Americans deserve more credit than Michelle Obama gives them. Time and again, this country has shown that it is readier for change and inclusion than its critics acknowledge. Americans were "ready" to elect a Black president long before Barack Obama appeared on the scene. They were ready to elect a Catholic president when John F. Kennedy ran in 1960, despite predictions that anti-Catholic bigotry would doom him. This is not a nation too benighted to send a woman to the White House.

Americans aren't stuck in the 1940s. They are more than ready to elect women to high office — including the highest. More than 9 out of 10 Americans say they would vote for a qualified woman for president. Scores of millions already have.

Which explains why Obama's words drew immediate pushback — and from one of her own party's most seasoned strategists. Donna Brazile, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee and a veteran of presidential politics, dismissed the notion outright. "The idea that America isn't ready," Brazile said bluntly, "is bulls**t."

She's right. And the woman who becomes America's first female president will prove it.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

(COMMENT, BELOW)