With a string of primary victories, including a decisive win in the main prize of California, Hillary Clinton has clinched Democratic Party’s nomination for president. Though women were running for president before the 19th Amendment gave them the right to vote in 1920 — a total of 14 women have run for president throughout history, beginning in 1872 — Clinton is the first female candidate of a major US party. Former secretary of state had secured the delegates she needed to be confirmed as nominee by today and is thus closer to the White House than any woman in American history.
In purely political terms, Clinton’s victory — after losing the Democratic nomination in 2008 —constitutes the greatest comeback by a presidential aspirant since Richard Nixon won the Republican nomination in 1968, after losing the presidential election of 1960. This, despite her advanced age.
It is beyond question a milestone in the march for gender equality as Barack Obama’s victory eight years ago was in race relations. Clinton’s main challenger Bernie Sanders has vowed to work together with her to defeat Donald Trump, Republican, in November, thus quelling concerns among Democrats about divisions in their ranks. President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden formally endorsed Clinton for president. Obama will join Clinton on the campaign trail for the first time this week in Wisconsin.
Clinton won’t actually be the nominee until a vote at the Democratic National Convention. With only next week’s District of Columbia primary remaining on the schedule, she has outperformed Sanders in the total number of votes cast, states won and pledged delegates earned.
If politics is the art of possible, the challenge for women even in a highly industrialized country and old democracy like America is “to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible,” as a young Hillary Rodham said in her commencement address to her fellow class of 1969 graduates of Wellesley College. Clinton had to face opposition from all quarters not only because of her gender but she was a highly involved first lady of Arkansas and then of the United States.
Critics never failed to point out her alleged connection to corporate money and a whiff of scandal has always dogged her political career. It is doubtful whether anybody in America has been subjected to the sort of scathing scrutiny that Clinton has endured throughout her public life. Over the past 30 years, no American political figure has absorbed as many blows as Clinton. And none has responded with a tenacity of purpose she has displayed. By practicing politics as “the art of making what appears to be impossible possible”, Clinton has, to quote her concession speech eight years ago at the end of the 2008 primary season, put another major crack in the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” in American politics.
She says women have voted for her in great numbers across the country. There are many reasons for this. One is the feeling that “having a woman president would make a great statement – a historic statement – about what kind of country we are, what we stand for.” But it would be too much to expect that Clinton’s election as president would further open the door to female leadership in every sphere or it would improve women’s rights, which, as she noted years ago, are human rights. This has not happened in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines where women have been elected president or prime minister.
Obama’s record is relevant here. Many ask: What has he done for black people since he took office in January 2008? This is a very hard question to answer. Although he is the first black president, he is not a black people’s president. In the same way, Clinton, if elected, will be president for all America, male and female.
