Nixon as Nostradamus?

“Certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner than you think. A woman can and should be able to do any political job that a man can do.” – Richard Nixon, 1969

Almost 40 years later, Hillary is the first lady with a chance of being put in the position to validate Nixon’s prediction. When accounting for this, sexism is the most cited reason. While that’s a legitimate answer, perhaps the most legitimate answer, it’s not the only one.

Predominantly Muslim nations such as Indonesia, Turkey and Pakistan, have all elected female heads of state. If sexism were the only thing in play when electing a female leader, it would naturally follow that U.S. citizens hold a less progressive view of women than those of Indonesia, Turkey, and Pakistan. Looking at the whole of each society, that argument seems inadequate.

No, the reason women in these Muslim nations achieved electoral success defies simple explanations like “sexism,” or “the absence of sexism.” It’s too intricate, just like reasons women have failed to achieve the same success in the U.S.

An adequate look at the matter is better suited for books and theses than a blog post, so I’m going to focus on one specific case (Chile), which points to one of numerous intricacies at work; the different treatment our media affords to female. I’m not referring to the allegations of inordinate attention paid to Hillary’s pantsuits, but rather the amateur conduct that extends to any potential presidential candidate who’s not a Caucasian male.

Chile

Legally, Chilean women are more repressed than their U.S. counterparts. All forms of abortion are illegal, and divorce wasn’t legalized until 2004. And yet, in 2005, Chilean voters did something seemingly impossible in the United States; they looked past gender, religious affiliation, and family life to elect Michelle Bachelet — a socialist, an atheist, and a separated mother of three — as president. I was living in Chile at the time, and noticed some peculiarities in the media’s campaign coverage.

Most surprisingly, her gender, religion and family life were largely irrelevant. For Bachelet, the center-left candidate, the media’s biggest questions revolved around her intentions for the nation’s touted liberal economic policies. The public interest fell along similar lines, more concerned with her stances than her personal life. Novel, right?

Here in The States, we get the opposite. The horse race drives the coverage as the issues take a back seat to more superficial characteristics. We get questions like “Is America ready for an African American in the oval office?” “Will U.S. citizens vote for a female president?” or “Can a Mormon become president?”

In the Chilean media, instead of asking whether or not the people were “ready” for a certain type of candidate, they let the candidate run, tallied the results, and found out that, yes, indeed they were. The U.S. media, on the other hand, chooses to speculate on questions that can only be answered at the polls. The question is irresponsible, implicitly labels female and minority candidates as outsiders who need vetting, distracts from the issues, and raisines doubts where, perhaps, they didn’t exist.

I’m not saying that the Chilean media is a model, or the Chilean citizenry is composed only of serious, politically informed individuals. I’m saying their media, for all the attention on celebrity gossip it holds in common with the United States media, doesn’t bring the same frivolity to its political reporting.

I’m also not saying that the media bears the bulk of responsibility for the uninterrupted string of Caucasian males in the White House. Access to channels of power, discrimination, media treatment and economic imbalances are all guilty, to varying degrees.

I am saying that the U.S. media needs to grow up. (I’m also saying that, at the polls, the U.S. is a much more conservative country than Chile, but that’s besides the point here)

One of the best parts of this election is that, when it’s over, we’ll know that we are ready for a female, or an African American, president. Not because we’ve had access to the opinions of experts, the results of polls, or the speculation of talking heads. We’ll know because the vote count will make the conclusion unavoidable.

Of course, an African American president, or a female president, is relatively tame compared to other possibilities. Only time will tell if we’ll ever be ready for an Native American president, or a Muslim president, or a gay midget president, but, if we ever are, the media should know better than to ask.

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