Conventional wisdom holds that the election of a white woman, Hillary Clinton or a black man, Barack Obama would be an historical event. Well, no and yes. Clinton's election might be called historical if one believes that all history begins and ends with, and is a function of, what happens in the United States. Women presiding over major states in the current era are no longer earth-shaking news.
Angela Merkel is doing nicely running Germany and Segolene Royal had a fair shot at presiding over France. One doesn't have to reach far back in history to confront Benazir Bhutto's two terms as Prime Minister of Pakistan, or Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of England, or India's Indira Gandhi, or Israel's Golda Meir, and so on.
Nor has the United States to be ashamed of its record of conferring the burdensome responsibilities of high office on women. Drew Faust, President of Harvard; Shirley Tilghman, President of Princeton; and Susan Hockfield, President of MIT are only a few of the large number of women presiding over our nation's leading institutions of higher learning.
The corporate world has not distinguished itself in the matter of trusting women with the reins of large numbers of corporations. Possibly this is because women tend to handle financial responsibilities better and might not be trusted to understand why corporations that are performing poorly should be paying their senior executives obscene bonuses. Still, there is Anne Mulcahy managing Xerox; and Patricia Russo at Alcatel-Lucent; and Andrea Jung at Avon; and Brenda Barnes, who passed up a shot at being CEO of Pepsico, and ended up running Sara Lee.
It is easy enough to go through major fields of endeavor in which women occupy leading positions in America. The arts and sciences owe much to women. Politically, as we look at the number of women in the US Senate and House of Representatives; or, the number of women in our state legislatures; or, the number of women governing our states, it is difficult to believe it was less than a century ago that women were not even allowed to vote in America. To the number of women holding elective office must be added those presently or formerly in high appointive positions, including Attorney General and Secretary of State.
Certainly, the accession of a woman to the Oval Office would represent another step forward in the march toward universal equality in the United States. The number of women fully and independently qualified for the post is legion, and it is certain the election of a woman president will occur in the near future. It will be a pure victory, owing nothing to their husband's coattails and occasioning no necessary footnote in the history books to qualify that victory. But in terms of historical importance, the election of a woman to the nation's highest political office would not remotely be comparable, domestically or internationally, to the election of an African-American.
No multi-racial nation outside of Africa has chosen a black leader to preside over it. Many nations have confronted and continue to confront racial discord, but none so profoundly as the United States, which clung to the odious institution of slavery well after other first world nations had seen the wrong of it. And when slavery was taken off the books in America, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, rank prejudice replaced economic interest as the engine of oppression well into the 20th Century.
We have come a long, hard way on the road to racial equality in America, and we are not there yet. Nevertheless, as Lyndon Johnson once said, America is a constant becoming: we have made progress in the struggle for racial equality in America, and we have before us an unprecedented opportunity to make still greater progress.
The election of Senator Barack Obama as president of the United States would be an event of historical importance eclipsing anything to be achieved by the elevation of Hillary Clinton. It would send a message to the world that America has turned to embrace its founding principles. We are at point in our national life in which the restoration of our international standing as a nation of humanistic principles is vitally important. History will record no clearer signal that America is America again than the election of one of its African-American citizens to its highest office.
Alongside that dazzling signal, the election of the nation's first woman president would be interesting, not earth-shaking; one small step for the United States; hardly a giant leap for mankind.