And if so, who is she?

by Candace Mittel

illustration by Grace Molteni

With the 2016 presidential race heating up, recent buzz has mostly surrounded Hillary Clinton’s official presidential announcement and, at last, a real chance at a woman president. What Clinton symbolizes and represents in terms of gender equality and women’s rights in the U.S. is, in many ways, a bipartisan triumph. But if 2016 is to actually pan out as a monumental year for women in politics, we need to see more than Clinton vs. The Nominated Male (be it Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, or Marco Rubio). We would need to see a strong, qualified woman on the GOP side as well.

But what would she look like? The Republican Party has never nominated a female presidential candidate, but in the recent past, women who have tried include Michele Bachmann in 2012, who lost the presidential candidate party nomination to Mitt Romney. In 2008, Susan Gail Ducey, a stay at home mom and registered nurse, who no one even knows or remembers, lost the nomination to John McCain (she actually switched from Republican to independent during her campaign). With McCain came a new republican female face: then Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin as the vice presidential candidate, the first Republican woman nominated for the vice presidency, although Palin was often treated like a presidential candidate due to McCain’s wavering health. In 2004, Millie Howard (at 1:43:30 of this video of a Lesser-Known Presidential Candidates’ Forum), who you also probably don’t know or remember, vied for the GOP presidential nomination and lost to George W. Bush. And in 2000, Elizabeth Dole gave it a good try but failed.

Out of all of these women, only one was qualified: Elizabeth Dole. At the time of her campaign, Dole, a Harvard Law School graduate, had an experienced career of public service, having served in both the Ronald Reagan (as Secretary of Transportation for five years) and George H.W. Bush (as Secretary of Labor for one year) presidential administrations. Dole was the president of the American Red Cross from 1991 to 1999, resigning only to pursue her presidential candidacy. After dropping out of the race before the primaries (and, to everyone’s surprise, not being named Bush’s vice-presidential nominee), Dole served as North Carolina’s first female Senator from 2003 to 2009.

Although Dole’s campaign received a lot of publicity, ultimately she isn’t the familiar female face of the Republican Party—Bachmann and Palin are, and not to our gender’s advantage. Palin gave us the “hockey mom” image of a female politician, a label she proudly welcomed; “a pit bull in lipstick,” she infamously called herself. While there is nothing wrong with a high-powered woman embracing femininity, or loving both her professional life and her family life, the respectability of this persona was overshadowed by Palin’s reputation as “the ditz,” the media coined. Although the media was, I admit, unusually and unnecessarily cruel to Palin (often in overtly sexist, demeaning ways, particularly in terms of appearance), Palin rightfully earned her place as a national joke. Her responses in interviews were awkward, seemingly rehearsed and robotic, exposing inexperience in many areas, foreign policy the most concerning among them. The New York Times described Palin’s first interview on ABC World News with Charles Gibson: “Ms. Palin appeared as an eager student, someone who has crammed for an exam and was repeating talking points.” Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live parodies of Palin proved furthermore the absurdity of Palin as a vice presidential candidate (with ludicrous and memorable one-liners like: “I can see Russia from my house!”)

But what SNL also brilliantly portrayed was how the public’s love of Palin grew, ironically, the more she messed up. In one sketch, Katie Couric (played by Amy Poehler) tells Palin (Tina Fey): “It seems to me that, when concerned, you become increasingly adorable.” As Salon writer Andrew O’hehir wrote regarding the accuracy of that particular skit’s reflection of reality: “That pretty well summed it up.” O’hehir pointed out that, “Sure, liberals acted horrified by Palin (in a delighted sort of way) and they didn’t vote for her and all that. But the basic underlying truth was that if loving Sarah Palin was wrong, the United States of America didn’t wanna be right.” He continued, “The greatness of Fey-as-Palin lay in its expression of pure wonder, a wonder we all felt: We lived in a country so profoundly bizarre that a person this clearly unqualified to be president could come this close.”

If that was our country’s first impression of a female Republican candidate, the next one, Michele Bachmann in 2012, was worse. Bachmann followed closely at Palin’s heels; some might even say she outdid Palin. Bachmann showed us an image of a woman who frequently made outrageous, irrational comments. “I find it interesting that it was back in the nineteen-seventies that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat President, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama—I just think it’s an interesting coincidence,” she said in 2009, according to a 2011 piece on Bachmann in the New Yorker. Or take her 2004 comment that being gay is “personal enslavement” and that we shouldn’t legalize same-sex marriage for fear that “little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and that perhaps they should try it.” President Obama joked at the 2015 White House Correspondent Dinner that, “Michele Bachmann predicted I would bring about the biblical end of days. Now that’s big. … Lincoln, Washington — they didn’t do that,” referring to a comment Bachmann had made on a radio program last week about Obama’s policies (specifically on Iran and same-sex marriage) leading to the end of time.

There’s an entire page, updated daily, at politifact.comdedicated to Bachmann’s absurd statements and rating them on a “truth-o-meter,” but I need not give any more examples to make the point that Bachmann was just impossible to take seriously, and, unfortunately, she ended up characterizing, in the public’s eye, not just the Republican party, but all female Republican politicians. Since there aren’t many women in high-level government positions, the ones that make it, end up being responsible for representing their gender much more so than men in those same high-profile positions. Palin and Bachmann have, in many ways, ruined the public’s image of Republican women of power.

There is, however, some grace and redemption to be found in Republican women like Condoleezza Rice, the first black woman to serve as the United States’ National Security Advisor and the first black woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State. Rice’s story is hugely inspiring. Growing up in the segregated south amidst racism and hardship, Rice pushed through to earn her degree in political science and later a PhD in international studies, becoming a political science professor and the first African-American provost of Stanford, one of the nation’s top universities. Rice’s subsequent political career as director of Soviet and East European affairs with the National Security Council in 1989, special assistant to President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1991, member of the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training in the Military in 1997, George W. Bush’s national security advisor in 2001, and the country’s 66th Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009, makes her an outstanding presidential candidate.

As one political writer commented a few months ago in a “wait, why isn’t Rice running for president, again?” post, Rice has “sterling academic credentials, years of diplomatic experience at the highest level, popularity among both wings of the GOP, and a trailblazer narrative that can trump even Hillary’s.” The cherry on top of it all for women’s rights? She’s pro-choice! The trouble is that Rice, although an ideal GOP female contender, isn’t running. “I am a professor at Stanford. I am a happy professor at Stanford, that’s where I’m staying,” she said in an interview in 2014, to the disappointment of the thirty-one thousand people who like the “Condoleezza Rice for President 2016” Facebook page.

Who are some other strong female contenders? Lara Brown, USNews op-ed writer and professor at George Washington University, named back in 2013  a few possible Republican women for a presidential run in 2016, including Mary Fallin (first female governor of Oklahoma), Nikki Haley (first female and first minority governor of South Carolina, and the youngest governor in the country), Susana Martinez (first female governor of New Mexico and first Hispanic female governor in the U.S.), and Senator of New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte.

Although advocates of women’s rights may not agree with these women’s policies (they are all, for example, pro-life, some with exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies), these are influential, experienced and intelligent women who have the right credentials to run for president. Fallin, Haley and Martinez were all reelected in November. Martinez was named one of the “100 Most Influential People” in the world by TIME Magazine in 2013. Ayotte has foreign policy credentials as a member of the Armed Services Committee and as part of the trio (alongside John McCain and Lindsey Graham) in 2013 that demanded answers on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

As of now, none of these women seem to be vying for 2016, but Brown hit on a crucial point: “while none of these women may run for president, it seems obvious that no woman will win the White House as long as so few women are considered for their party’s nomination.”

There are a number of reasons why so few women are considered for their party’s nomination, but there’s a new one to add to the list. USNews op-ed writer, Susan Milligan, explains the lack of women running for president as such: “A major reason women are so underrepresented in elected office is because they don’t run. And that, quite often, is because perfectly qualified women still seem to think they don’t have the qualifications necessary to serve in office.” Her suggested solution to the problem, however, is to encourage unqualified women like Carly Fiorina, who is apparently still considering entering into the Republican presidential race for 2016, to run just as much as any of the qualified women, like Rice or Ayotte, I have mentioned.

Milligan’s logic is as follows: “On paper, at least, Fiorina has at best no traditional credentials to be president, and at worst, no business at all running for the job. And the reason this matters is that men have been doing this for many, many years.”

Milligan is right that if men who, as she claims, “have no experience in public sector budgeting or legislative negotiations will wake up, sit on the edge of their respective beds, and say to themselves, ‘sure, I could be president,’” then women should be able to do the same. At the same time, the few women who have done the same ended up doing more harm for the image of Republican women in politics than good. Fiorina, if she goes for it, will likely turn out the same way Palin and Bachmann did: a national laughingstock, good fodder for late night shows and “SNL,” and another stain on the public’s perception of Republican female politicians. 

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Candace Mittel graduated in 2013 from Northwestern University, where she studied Mathematics, Jewish Studies and Creative Writing Nonfiction (and no, they are not connected, but she’s open to suggestions). She currently lives, teaches and writes in Chicago. Read more of her feature work for The Riveter here.

Grace Molteni is a Midwest born and raised designer, illustrator, and self-proclaimed bibliophile, currently calling Chicago home. For more musings, work, or just to say hey check her out on Instagram or at her personal website.