I covered my first presidential election 40 years ago as a reporter for United Press International. In the decades hence, I’ve carried on the hoary press tradition of covering politics like a horse race, writing about many stallions in the presidential sweepstakes. But it wasn’t until this week that I got to cover my first filly.
Strictly speaking, of course, Sen. Hillary Clinton isn’t the first woman to run for president. If you’re talking about major party candidates, that honor is shared by Democratic Reps. Shirley Chisholm of New York and Patsy Mink of Hawaii. Mink entered the Oregon primary in 1972 as an anti-war candidate. Chisholm, who became the first American-American woman elected to Congress in 1968, also entered the 1972 presidential contest.
Colorado’s own Pat Schroeder entered the lists in 1988. With her typical wit, when she was asked if she was running for president “as a woman,” she deadpanned: “I didn’t know I had a choice.”
Even so, the Hillary Clinton I watched at her Tuesday whistle stop on the Auraria campus is in a different class politically from her distaff predecessors. She isn’t the first serious woman candidate for the presidency. But she is the first woman to be taken seriously by the political establishment. Indeed, if the polls can be believed, Hillary is far and away the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in a year when George Bush’s failed presidency makes any Democrat the odds-on favorite in November.
Frontrunner or not, Hillary still confronts the same question Schroeder faced. But far from laughing it off, she plays a deep game that both exploits and defuses the gender gap separating her from her horde of male rivals.
Former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb set Hillary up well in his introduction, in which he said, “She isn’t running for president because she’s a woman. She’s running because she’s the right woman to lead America.”
Hillary followed up with practiced ease at the end of her talk when she recounted her wonder at the number of very elderly women who have attended her events. One of them told the junior senator from New York, “I’m 95 years old. I was born before women could vote. I’m going to live long enough to see a woman in the White House!”
And there it is, the classic political two-step: denying that you’re running just because you’re a member of a specific constituency while underscoring to that constituency that you definitely are one of them.
John F. Kennedy danced that two-step perfectly in 1960 by defusing the bitter anti-Catholic prejudice that had doomed Al Smith in 1928 while luring millions of Republican Catholics to vote for him.
I was a Catholic in 1960 and had suffered my share of bigotry growing up. I still remember how thrilled I was that a member of our long-scorned faith could rise to the presidency. I avoided the press box Tuesday in favor of mingling with the crowd — and saw the very same pride in the faces of the women in the audience, many of whom teared up after hearing the anecdote.
Hillary Clinton isn’t the best stump speaker I ever saw, but she does have the best coach — Bill Clinton. She can’t quite match his “I feel your pain” style, but she has overcome the woodenness that used to mark her speeches. She was relaxed and lively working the friendly crowd in Denver. Most significantly, she threw enough red meat to the crowd to cater to their anti-Bush feelings without committing herself to anything that would undercut her ability to govern.
That’s the mark of a winner.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@) is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
