“We need a woman at the head of the White House,” Chelsea Clinton, 33, said on the day that she and her mother posed for a Twitter portrait.
That is going to be a good chunk of Hillary Clinton’s almost inevitable run for the White House, and it’s easy to see why: “Vote for me, I’m a woman” may not be the most compelling theme there is. But it beats, “Vote for me, I presided over a dysfunctional State Department as part of an administration with no coherent foreign policy.”
We should not care what gender or race the next president is. If we could elect a woman who has Margaret Thatcher’s belief in the value of the free market and western traditions, and courage to lead, then I’d love to have that woman in the White House. But if we elect a woman who believes in bigger government, higher taxes, less personal responsibility, and is motivated mostly by careerism, as opposed to ambition mixed with a care for the commonweal? Not so much.
Apparently unaware of the vast strides American women have made in the last fifty years, Chelsea also went on to say that women need more “role models everywhere.” Companies actively recruit us, we get more than half of the degrees given out on American college campuses, and a recent Pew study indicated that many American women out-earn their husbands, and Chelsea Clinton hasn’t noticed?
The amazing thing is that, if Mrs. Clinton is the nominee, the debate will be framed at least partly in terms of the “need” to have someone of a particular gender in the White House. And here’s the really bad thing: conservatives are very likely to let them get by with it. Women who represent an optimistic, free-market approach to solving our nation’s problems are “outspent, outnumbered, out-researched.”