With the nation’s best interests in mind, I don’t personally know anyone who cares a whit regarding the gender or race of our next president or any other trusted leader.
Nevertheless, immediately following a second elected term of a Black president, Barack Obama, as his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton repeatedly attributed her 2016 election loss to “unconscious” gender bias.
In 2017, twice-failed presidential candidate Clinton told CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria’s GPS” that “sexism and misogyny” were “endemic” in American society.
She said, “I’m a middle-class girl from the middle of the country. So, I always struggled with what’s my story? It suddenly dawned on me I was the beneficiary of these radical changes in women’s rights and opportunities that began in the '60s and continue, and that I could have and maybe should have tried harder to tell that story, but I never thought there would be that receptive of an audience.”
Referring later in 2020 also to shortfalls of failed female presidential candidates Democrat Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Clinton told Vanity Fair: “I think we made some progress, but there still was a lot of the unconscious bias and the gendered language that has been used around the women candidates. I think it affected all of the women that ran.”
Clinton added that she believed that the shift, or real change, will only take place after someone breaks “that highest, hardest glass ceiling” and becomes the first woman president.
No, Hillary Clinton did not lose the election due to sexism and misogyny, she did so because she was a terrible, polarizing, and legitimately untrusted candidate.
As secretary of state, Hillary had been famously AWOL from response during September 11-12, 2012 terrorist attacks on her department’s U.S. diplomatic compound and a nearby CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, which left desperate Ambassador Christopher Stevens, along with Information Officer Sean Smith and heroic former Navy SEALS Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods dead.
Secretary of State Clinton had also illegally deleted 30,000 agency-restricted emails from her private unsecure server, many of which were known to contain highly classified materials.
We have since also learned that the 2016 Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funded entirely bogus “dirty Russian dossier” collusion charges cooked up as a distraction from Hillary’s “email problem” that dogged Donald Trump throughout his presidency and led to a failed impeachment charade.
Then, there’s Kamala Harris, Hillary’s tight competitor as least likeable or trustworthy past (and potential future) presidential candidate whom President Biden pointedly picked as his vice presidential running mate based upon gender and race.
If President Biden’s plummeting approval numbers aren’t already disastrous enough, Kamala’s are even worse.
Whereas an early November USA Today-Suffolk University poll had Biden’s job approval rating dipping to 38%, with 59% disapproving, Harris' approval rating was 28%, with 51% disapproving of her performance and 21% undecided.
In addition, there is rumored tension and dysfunctionality between their White House VP and presidential staff offices, if not between their personages, which has reportedly reached an “exhausted stalemate.”
The ugly truth of the matter is that Kamala Harris is fundamentally unlikeable, even by her own staff.
As reported by Politico, her office was “chaotic” with a “tense and at times dour” atmosphere.“
“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” one source told the outlet at the time. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported, but a place where people feel treated like s***.”
A consistent problem reported by The Washington Post: Ms. Harris refuses “to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members” and would “then berate employees when she appeared unprepared” because she’s not “willing to do the work.”
This unpreparedness appears evidenced by Harris’ rocky visit to Mexico and Guatemala in June, and her brief trip to El Paso at the end of that month, as the Biden administration’s point person to lead responses to the out-of-control open U.S.-Mexico southern border migrant “issue.”
Harris was later conspicuously missing in action when Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas, met with their Mexican counterparts seeking help to address the border crossing deluge.
In short, Kamala comes across as a shallow, insincere politician as revealed in a NASA-sponsored video displaying her cloyingly phony behavior speaking to child actors about space, and also her cringeworthy appearance with a phony French accent and arm waving while speaking to French scientists.
So, after all, are most of us really biased against having women as presidents or serving in other top-level government and corporate positions?
Actually no… we aren’t.
A 2018 Pew Research Center poll taken two years after Hillary Clinton became the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major U.S. political party, and also with a record number of women running for Congress that year, found that a majority of Americans largely see men and women as equally capable when it comes to some key qualities and behaviors that are essential for leadership.
Overall, it showed that the public believes that having more women in top positions in business and government would benefit some aspects of the quality of life for all Americans.
And as for racial bias, Barack Obama’s two-term presidency proved resoundingly otherwise.
Many, including myself, will welcome Hillary Clinton’s urging of a long overdue event when the first woman — add to that, one of any color — breaks that “highest, hardest glass ceiling” of becoming president.
The only requisite celebratory condition is for that individual to accomplish this historic breakthrough through meritorious forces of experience, judgment, integrity and earned achievements … not sledgehammer politics of presumptive self-entitlement and ambitious conceit.
Accordingly, Hillary Clinton and Vice President Kamala Harris need never to apply for that honor.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 11 books, "Beyond Flagpoles and Footprints: Pioneering the Space Frontier" co-authored with Buzz Aldrin (2021), is available on Amazon along with all others. Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.