Women can break the ceiling, not the election

“Don’t even look at me about running because you all are lying. You’re not ready for a woman. You are not. So don’t waste my time.”

So lamented former First Lady Michelle Obama in a November 5 conversation with Tracee Ellis Ross at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Associated Press reports. The wife of the 44th President Obama, though icy in tone, is admittedly correct in her conclusion.

The United States isn’t ready for a female president. 

This is not to say that women cannot be president, nor to suggest that they cannot pursue careers in public policy, law, and politics. They have before, and the country is better for it. But there is a reason why the above statement used the syntax that it did. There’s no question that women possess the talent, discipline, and steadiness that Washington requires. The United States isn’t ready for a female president because pretending we’ve reached the level of political maturity doesn’t solve problems, nor does it make us enlightened. 

If anything, it makes us dishonest. 

And, this is not so much an indictment of the ability of women as it is a rebuke of the cracked foundation they stand on.

Oftentimes, men can scrape by in the world of politics by virtue of being able to chew gum and walk at the same time. Women, unfortunately, do not have that luxury. Voters want a commander in chief who’s confident, but not too confident, tough but not cold, maternal but not emotional, and authoritative but not shrill. It’s an impossible audition, and I’d argue we aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. 

Sadly, until the country learns to evaluate female leadership with the same steadiness it applies to men, Michelle Obama’s warning will hang over every woman with a national profile: don’t even talk about running, because you aren’t ready for what the public will do to you.

Many point to the folly of Hillary Clinton as a cautionary tale for the average female politician. A The first lady-turned political candidate (though she was no stranger to cutthroat politics; she became the first female senator from New York in 2001) ran on the ethos of foreign policy experience as secretary of state, congressional governance, and years as the nation’s top democrat, perhaps second only to Barack Obama. 

She lost, poetically, in an electoral college defeat despite winning the popular vote. And, in an election loss emblematic of a broken system, Hillary Clinton faded from the public eye with grace, though never quite shaking the scandals designed to bury her. Benghazi, the Steele dossier, and the email controversy, were all examples of how political slip ups are amplified when the candidate is a woman. 

Clinton wasn’t unique in her criticism either. Nikki Haley, a candidate for the Republican nomination back in 2024, was described as  “erratic,” “inauthentic,” and “too ambitious.” And, though she lost the primary, she later went on to endorse then-candidate Donald Trump for president, a move cited as “politically opportunistic.” However, her opponents, business mogul Vivek Ramaswamy and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, did the same, with few, if any, repercussions. 

Clinton’s own husband, President Bill Clinton, not only narrowly escaped an impeachment inquiry,  but also left office in 2001 on the back end of a two-term presidency as a beloved  leader with a 66% approval rating.

Therefore, until the country learns to evaluate female leadership with the same steadiness it applies to men, Michelle Obama’s warning will hang over every woman with a national profile: “don’t even talk about running, because you aren’t ready for what the public will do to you.”

Simply put, women are ready, willing, and able to be president. The presidency, however, is not ready to be theirs. 

American politics still treat female ambition as though it is a foreign object to be ostracized, or worse, a threat to be mitigated. And this national reluctance isn’t, nor has it ever been, abstract. In fact, it shaped the rise and fall of the first female vice president in ways most often fail, forget, or refuse to see. 

Kamala Harris made history as the first black, South Asian, and female vice president. She was a groundbreaking candidate, smashing social barriers as well as financial ones, raising over a billion dollars in just 107 days.

It is in this exact environment—one that celebrates a woman’s ascent yet still dissects her existence—that Kamala Harris attempted to govern. And over time, the toll showed. What many now call bitterness was, in truth, the political scar tissue of someone expected to be historic without ever being allowed to be human. Harris’s beleaguerment was perhaps one of the starkest in American history.
And her defeat, ultimately, through underperformance and overcompensating, served to embitter one of the nation’s most optimistic candidates.
Harris lost the popular vote by a margin of over 3 million and was handed an Electoral College rout of 226 to 312. 

What came after that fateful election night only hardened her discontent. She reemerged not with contrition but combativeness, carrying the memoir of her doomed presidential campaign, 107 Days, as a flashlight through the wreckage of a failed crusade.

The stories of her unspooling carry a quiet resentment, insisting that she was compromised long before polls opened. She tells not of dramatic backstabbing but of quieter, subtler cruelties. Labeling Biden’s choice to run again as a dangerous ego trip, she makes no small accusation about the support of chief campaign officials through something of a diatribe: “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed," she writes in her book.”

Yet still, concerns about her as the candidate are clearly voiced.

“Her lack of acknowledgement of her womanhood throughout the campaign…[as if it were] like a taboo,” one attendee of her Nov. 4 Portland book tour wrote me. “She mentions being the first to hold many of her offices, but she doesn’t elaborate on why that trailblazing is important.”
Harris’s bitterness is not a mystery. It is the blatant, predictable, and repeated outcome of a system that applauds women for breaking ceilings, then blames them when the shards draw blood.
“The back cover of her book starts with an anecdote about how her secret service name was Pioneer,’ but it’s unclear what kind of pioneer she sees herself as…she’s still reluctant to speak on the fact that yes, indeed, she would have been the first female president,” the attendee went on to say. “She treats her gender like the elephant in the room, which is never going to be an effective way of going about a campaign that aims to revolutionize the look of the office of the president.” 

In essence, Harris’s campaign—the brutal loss, the fallout, and the still raw emotions, illustrate something of a cautionary tale, one that First Lady Obama corroborated when she said that the country “has a lot of growing up to do.”

Personally, I am proud to live in a nation where young women and girls can plant their feet and declare that they are going to hold the highest office in the land. It is my honor to live in a country where our overarching narrative is that if you work at something, you will succeed.  But this work is not a singular person’s effort. 

It also requires the labor of a nation willing to let those people succeed. 

It requires the willingness to become more than the sum of our parts. 

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