The First Woman President

Column: It’s not Hillary

BY: Matthew Continetti
March 7, 2014 5:00 am

So long have I waited for the glass ceiling to be shattered, for the barrier to be breached, for the blessed moment to arrive. I had thought that the day that begins with a woman in the Oval Office, with more than 50 percent of our population feeling truly represented, was a day long in coming. I had thought 2008 would be the year we made history, with Hillary Clinton coming so close to the Democratic nomination, with Sarah Palin becoming the first woman on the Republican ticket.

But it was not to be. America reverted to her old habits of sexism and gynophobia, denying Clinton her place in the sun, even questioning the maternity of Palin’s youngest child. Barack Obama was elected to the White House. The contest four years later was, in sheer numbers, a regression: In 2012 no women were present on any major party ticket. Obama won his second term.

Only now do I see how mistaken I have been, how shallow my thinking, how guilty of succumbing to the confines of the hetero-normative imagination. If Bill Clinton “displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas,” and for that reason could be named by a Nobel laureate as “our first black President,” “blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime”; if Barack Obama “had to come out of a different closet,” had to learn “to be black the way gays learn to be gay,” if his “discovery in adulthood of a community not like your own home and the struggle to belong in both places, without displacement, without alienation” mirrors “the gay experience,” making him “the first gay president”; and if his positions on Israel make him, in the words of a former employee, “the first Jewish president,” then our ascription of gender identity need not be based on chromosomes or sexual characteristics, on hair style or costume, on self-identification, on arbitrary and socially constructed discourses of macho and feminine. It is clear to me now that we have had a woman president since January 20, 2009. Barack Obama’s story is America’s story. It is our story. It is the female story.

Strong women have surrounded Obama since childhood: his mother, who raised him after his deadbeat dad fled to Kenya; his grandmother, “who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to become vice president at a local bank”; his magnificent wife and First Lady Michelle Obama, before whom we all bow down; Michelle’s mother Marian Shields Robinson; the fierce pixie Valerie Jarrett; his billionaire heiress secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker; the gaunt and severe and silver-haired Kathleen Sebelius. Obama’s ascent to power, Sharon Jayson pointed out long ago, testifies to both the struggles and successes of single moms. From these ladies and others Obama drew lessons in how to raise his two beautiful daughters, in the value of women to American society, in the art of wearing mom jeans.

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