“It’s hard to fathom, but it has been 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket,” Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times on Sunday. At least she got those first four words right — it is indeed hard to fathom because it’s not true.
“Either @Tim Kaine and I had a very vivid shared hallucination four years ago or Maureen had too much pot brownie before writing her column,” tweeted Hillary Clinton, who might have won the election had she shown such wit four years earlier.
Not only did Clinton and Kaine run for the Democrats just four years ago (maybe people just want to forget), but if you’re willing to look at both parties, John McCain and Sarah Palin ran for the Republicans in 2008.
What this seems to prove is that “cognitive decline” is the theme of the year among liberal Democrats, starting out big at the top of the ticket and moving on down to the New York Times’s copy editors.
There will likely be a third such ticket this year of Joe Biden and someone. And it now seems a given that there will be two big-party male/female (or female/male) tickets in 2024. But the last two times women ran for office on a national ticket, they were charisma-laden and fairly unqualified. Geraldine Ferraro had not gone beyond being a competent and workaday member of Congress. Palin was governor of one of the smallest (in population terms, anyway) and most remote states in the union, far from most mainland concerns.
This time, however, there are plenty of women on both sides of the aisle who are truly prepared for the presidency, and the odds are good that 2024 will see women on top of both of their tickets. Former governor and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is likely to give it a go. So will whoever turns out to be Biden’s vice president.
Since the country was founded, there have been three barriers to holding what has turned out to be the world’s highest office: sex, creed, and color. Of these, sex has turned out to be the most difficult and also the last one to fall.
The religion exception was laid to rest by John Kennedy in 1960 when he made the case that his religion hadn’t kept his big brother Joe from having to die for his country. At that time, World War II had made the whole country a much more unified place than it had been previously.
The race bar, which everyone thought would be last to topple, fell to Barack Obama in 2008, the son of a Kenyan Muslim and a white Kansas mother whose family had settled New England in the 17th century.
Once a bar falls, it is vanquished forever: Five years after Kennedy’s death, the devout seminarian Eugene McCarthy ran for president (against devout fellow Catholic Robert F. Kennedy) without his religion being even once mentioned. In 2000, Al Gore picked the orthodox Jew Joseph Lieberman to be his vice presidential candidate to no comment at all except that it would help him in Florida.
These barriers go up as a matter of course when they fit the times as they were (there were few Slavs or Italians around when this country was founded). They stay up for a time through the force of inertia, and then, when the time is right, they fall.
