And now it begins.

I’ve heard it before – and I’ll hear it again.

After Joe Biden wisely (but gallantly) dropped his re-election bid, the presumptive Democratic nominee is Vice-President Kamala Harris.

If elected, she would be the first Asian and African American president, and the first woman to be president. She is smart and tough and has extraordinary experience. But it seems clear that our country would rather have a lying and lascivious convicted felon and failed businessman than the most qualified person who is also a known woman.

The familiar talk is already going the rounds.

 There are pissy little remarks from minority voters … as a prosecutor, Harris put a great many African American men in prison for crimes they committed – would a genuine sister do that?

There are scathing big remarks from majority voters (men and woman) … aren’t women just sort of too emotional and flighty to be president? (This from a country that was okay with having the male equivalent of the Red Queen screaming ‘off with their heads!’ daily from the Oval Office, often while consuming a fast-food burger or three, who fantasized about curing COVID by ingesting and injecting disinfectants.)

But mostly, the solemn pronouncements go something like this:

I’m just GREAT with a woman being president – just not this woman.

It was true with Hilary Clinton, perhaps more qualified to be president than anyone who has run in the past two decades, including Joe Biden and Barack Obama. She was just too “hard” and too “deceitful” and there was that matter of “Benghazi” (tossed around often by people who didn’t really even know where that place was …)

It was true of Elizabeth Warren, supremely bright and savvy senator from Massachusetts (too much of a “schoolmarm,” not really a woman “of the people.”)

It would be true of tough, personable, young Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer … tough, no-nonsense, a defender of the right to terminate a pregnancy, an advocate for decent infrastructure … she’s good at finding common ground. She has two children (good) but she was divorced once (bad). (Again, this ignores the fact that the presumptive president makes a kind of hobby of this practice …)

No one knows why the common feeling seems to be that a woman just can’t be trusted to be the leader of the free world – and not because men have made such a great job of it either. It’s just a feeling, one that seems not only culturally durable but intuitive. The feeling is shared by women, too, perhaps not at the deepest gut level, but indeed, shared.

Many just don’t trust a woman at the pinnacle of leadership – in fact, some actively mock and resent the very notion. For many men and some women, a leader needs to have an attribute that most women just don’t have, which is to say, a penis.

And so, it isn’t really true that American men (and many women) of goodwill are fine with a woman being president, “just not this woman.”

Is that going to change? I would say not in my lifetime.

For a woman could combine all the wisdom and courage and stamina of Ghandi, Winston Churchill and Elizabeth the II and she still wouldn’t be the “right woman.”

Because she’s a woman. And because we’re Americans. – JM