ARTICLE TWO OF the United States Constitution on the powers and duties of the president is surprisingly open-ended. That is because the framers knew who the president would be: George Washington. Already the people of Revolutionary America venerated Washington and spoke of him as the “father” of the nation. The men who wrote the Constitution had confidence in Washington and faith that his improvisations in the office would set the nation on the right course.
Washington himself would have been happy to retire to his Mount Vernon plantation, but he embraced his role out of a sense of patriotic duty. In 1789, he faced two daunting challenges. First, he had to project gravitas and authority, so as to impress on hostile European monarchies that the infant nation was here to stay on the world stage. Second, at a time when the men and women who made up “We the People” identified themselves as citizens of a state, not the United States, Washington sought to embody an ideal of an American and craft a distinctly American model of leadership. John Adams later said of Washington, “He was the best actor of the presidency we have ever had.”
In short, Americans have always understood that the president is far more than just the CEO of the federal government. As the primary authority in foreign affairs and as the ceremonial head of state, the president personifies national power. Occupying the one office elected by the people of all the United States, the president symbolizes national unity and embodies national identity. Our forty-four presidents stand as exemplars of our democracy, of the living American Dream, of our national narrative about equality and opportunity for all.
In the heat of the 2008 presidential race, presidential candidate Barack Obama once warned his supporters about what his opponents might say to win. “So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”
With this quip Obama obliquely posed the question, can you envision me, an African American, as president of the United States? After all, three of the seven presidents pictured on America’s currency were slave owners. Obama’s comment plumbed the murky depths of our troubled history and our contentious contemporary politics. The backlash was as predictable as it was fierce.
In our national imagination, who seems presidential?
The Constitution says that the president must be thirty-five years old and a natural born citizen. And that is it. Although the pronoun he is used liberally in the text, nowhere do the Founding Fathers say that the president must be white or be a man. Indeed, the words male, slave, and white appear nowhere in the original United States Constitution.
American voters twice elected an African American president.
Is America ready for a woman president? Have the barriers that kept women out of the Oval Office for more than two centuries fallen?
We’ve seen how women’s leadership in politics matters on a practical level, how it affects people’s lives in tangible ways. We’ve seen that women are more apt to work across party lines and tend to approach governing in a more cooperative fashion. We’ve observed that the United States has some ways to go to close our gender gaps in pay, leadership, and other areas, and also that women elected officials pay more attention than men do to protecting civil rights and advancing gender equality.
As we’ve seen, women candidates at all levels of office are as likely as men to win election. We’ve seen that among voters, there is pent-up demand for a woman to be president, and that there is enthusiasm for the particular woman, Hillary Clinton, who currently has the best chance of becoming America’s first woman president. And we’ve seen that for all intents and purposes, the double standard is dead. Gender bias is no longer the reason America hasn’t yet elevated a woman to the Oval Office.
Yes, we can say to our daughters and sons that we have crossed a historic threshold. A woman can now be president of the United States. And that is progress.