Building the First Female President

Frankly, I can’t picture it. But many people can.

President Hillary Clinton.

The best way to prevent that, says former Bill Clinton advisor Dick Morris, is for Republicans to draft Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to run for president in 2008. And if they were the only two candidates, then what are the chances we’d have our first female president? By my accounting, 100%.

If it were possible for a moment to purge Hillary and Condi from our minds and just imagine the first female presidential candidate -- and running against a man -- how would her campaign be run? With frequent nods to her gender-breaking role in U.S. history? As just another candidate talking about the issues? With a constant fear that American voters aren’t ready for a female candidate?

I posed the what-if scenario to Matthew Cunningham, who has a public affairs business in Orange and previous involvement in Republican local and U.S. Senate races in California. He also handled press relations in California during Steve Forbes’ 2000 race for the Republican presidential nomination.

As for a female president, Cunningham says, we’ll have one someday. And he isn’t talking about Geena Davis, who plays the commander in chief on TV these days.

“It’s inevitable,” Cunningham says. “As we get more women as elected officials, it’s naturally going to percolate up to a woman being president.”

And even if campaign advisors wanted to, they couldn’t avoid the news coverage that would surround the uniqueness of such a candidate, Cunningham says.

Not that they’d want to.

“It’d be a historical first,” Cunningham says. “That would be a big part of the coverage. That would tend to be an advantage to the candidate. People would get excited about it.”

The campaign team wouldn’t need to burn the midnight oil thinking of ways to play up the story, Cunningham suggests. The press would take care of that all by itself.

A Condoleezza Rice presidential run, Cunningham says, would add the racial element to an already historic candidacy. Although he’d much prefer Rice to Hillary Clinton, Cunningham says Rice might have a tough time in 2008 because of her lack of elective experience. He expects her to be the GOP vice presidential candidate.

I ask Cunningham if the country is at a point where it “wants” a female president, just for the sake of having one. Other countries have elected female leaders, and maybe the American electorate will think it’s time here, too.

He doesn’t foresee a groundswell to elect a woman just to make history; he thinks it’ll happen only when the candidate and the issues mesh.

If he were advising on a woman-for-president campaign, Cunningham says, he’d be careful not to make that the focus of the race. That very thing undercut the short-lived Elizabeth Dole presidential run in the 2000 primaries, he says. He notes, wryly, that he might make an exception on a Hillary Clinton campaign, if only to use the historic first to steer attention away from the “Clinton baggage” that would inevitably be part of her presidential run.

Not that he’d get anywhere near a Hillary campaign, but Cunningham concedes she could win in 2008. She’d rally forces strongly for and against her, he says, and her campaign would have to appeal to undecided and swing voters. In a way, he says, that wouldn’t be greatly unlike the George Bush strategy.

If only for the theater of it, how can you root against a Rice-Clinton showdown? If that wouldn’t energize sleepy voters, we should quit having elections.

Cunningham is confident of one thing: The campaign staff of the first female candidate with a real shot to win will have a blast. Campaign workers like politics because they feel it attaches them to history, and there’s no doubt that history beckons to the first female president.

President Geena Davis, anyone?