When Hillary Rodham Clinton ran for president in 2008 and 2016, she spoke early and often about the historic first that she would represent if she became the first woman elected president. Soft-focus moments and glass-ceiling metaphors dominated her campaigns for president for the next eight years.
When she kicked off her campaign in 2007 as a U.S. senator, she did it from a cozy floral couch and invited Americans to join her in “a conversation.”
“Let’s talk, let’s chat, let’s start a dialogue about your ideas and mine,” she said. Ummm, OK. Never mind that Clinton was already a U.S. senator and former first lady of the United States. Her campaign for president was a chat. The campaign that followed never caught on the way Barack Obama’s did. Making history for Clinton was not as important to Democratic voters as electing Obama.
When she conceded her race for the nomination to Obama, Clinton lamented, “We weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time.” Hopefully, she said, the path for a woman “will be a little easier next time.”
But it wasn’t easier for Clinton in 2016, when she won the Democratic nomination and again chose, strategically, to put her gender front and center.
When she launched that run at Franklin Roosevelt Park in New York, she described the grassy setting as “a place… with absolutely no ceilings.” Her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was preceded by a video of shattering glass.
When she planned what was supposed to be a victory party on election night, she booked New York’s Javits Center, a venue with, what else, a glass ceiling. But all the metaphors and history-making moments didn’t get the job done. She lost the race to Donald Trump.
Democrats, especially Democratic women, were devastated. But through a bizarre set of circumstances, including a skipped primary process, Vice President Kamala Harris could now be 80 days away from making the kind of history Clinton always longed for.
But the vice president is using a completely different playbook to do it.
Instead of floral sofas and conversations, the imagery of Harris’ campaign has almost nothing to do with gender and everything to do with power. She flies into campaign stops on Air Force Two and descends a staircase flanked by the seal of the United States and her Secret Service security detail.
Tearing a page from the Trump playbook, she has started holding rallies with her government plane parked prominently behind her with the “United States of America” printed boldly in the background of every camera shot.
Her speeches are about her roles as a district attorney, California attorney general, senator and vice president. Instead of talking about ceilings, she talks about perpetrators, especially the ones she says are like the former president. “I know Donald Trump’s type” has become one of her loudest applause lines.
The only time Harris said the word “woman” during her recent campaign speech in Atlanta was when she promised to protect “a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body.”
Harris doesn’t seem to need to discuss the history she would make if she becomes the first woman elected president. The images say it for her. At times, it seems like Donald Trump is finishing the job.
“Is she Black or is she Indian?” Trump asked recently about Harris, who is biracial. She’s definitely dumb, he likes to say. “She is a low IQ individual,” he said at his Atlanta rally. Other stops feature Trump calling her “nasty,” “crazy,” and “an incompetent, socialist lunatic.” Behind closed doors, he has reportedly referred to her multiple times with the B-word.
“Every time DT says something about Kamala Harris having a low IQ, he motivates hundreds of women to reach out to other women,” said Melita Easters, who founded Georgia WIN list to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights to office in Georgia. “And JD Vance’s attitudes about women are practically Stone Age. So the more they talk, the more doors get knocked, the more calls get made, and the more postcards get written for Harris.”
Shirley Franklin was Atlanta’s first Black female mayor and followed the same strategy as Harris, or it’s more accurate to say Harris is following the same strategy that she did — never mentioning the history she would make if elected.
“I did not talk about it. I mean, I was obviously a woman. I was obviously African American, but I was conscious of, of having, a cross section of supporters,” she said. “That was not to deny the history of African Americans in the United States or in Atlanta, but rather to acknowledge that it is part of the history of the country and part of the experience of the voters.”
Sometimes the people Franklin expected to be the most supportive were not. One elderly Black woman once told her it wasn’t befitting of a woman to be mayor.
“I was shocked by the response because some of the difference is generational,” she said. “It’s not just racial, some of it is generational.”
And that may be the real reason behind Harris’ silence. The people who want a female president will vote for her. The people who don’t want a woman president don’t have to be reminded what they’re getting if they pick her anyway.
Easters counsels her new female Democratic recruits that there is no need to point out the obvious about themselves and their gender. And she said the same goes for Harris with Georgia voters.
“She’s talking about moving forward with a vision for America — she doesn’t have to focus on the marble ceiling,” Easters said. “Hillary Rodham Clinton did — and she didn’t win.”
So far in 2024, American voters seem less interested in making history than in making progress in their own lives. Whether Harris is a man or a woman seems to be beside the point right now. And that may be its own kind of progress.
But Easters said there won’t be real progress for female candidates without a win.
“Until Kamala Harris’ hand is on the Bible and she’s taken the oath of office, we’re not past this as a country,” she said.
That may be true, but don’t expect Kamala Harris to tell you so.
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