Hillary Clinton was right: it takes more than one woman to break the glass ceiling

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/16/hillary-clinton-glass-ceiling-female-candidates

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In 2008, then-candidate Hillary Clinton said that her supporters put “18 million cracks” in “that highest, hardest glass ceiling” and inspired a lot of other female politicians – including then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin – to take their own hammers to it.

But the question for women has remained: What next? Everyone expects that Clinton, the perennial candidate and increasingly feminist campaigner, will take another run at her party’s nomination and the US presidency in 2016. But shattering a glass ceiling doesn’t mean much if the shards take out all the other women below. (See also: Palin, Sarah.)

On Wednesday night in Kentucky – where she blew Obama out of the water six years ago – Clinton asked voters to “put another crack in the glass ceiling” by sending Alison Lundergan Grimes to the US senate in place of current minority leader Mitch McConnell. Clinton is also expected to make campaign appearances for senate candidate Michelle Nunn in Georgia and incumbent senators Kay Hagan and Jeanne Shaheen in North Carolina and New Hampshire, respectively, before Election Day. They need Hillary Clinton, because their races are all tied up and Hillary Clinton is the most popular Democrat in America (other than Michelle Obama). But they also need more than Hillary Clinton, because they are more than women candidates.

Last week, Grimes referred to herself as a “Clinton Democrat”, much to the consternation of the Washington establishment, which isn’t used to that term being used as anything but an insult. (The Clintons are close with the Lundergan family, who are big in Kentucky politics.) Coupled with her unwillingness to declare whether she voted for President Obama in 2012 (he lost the state by 23 points) and her willingness to criticize the president’s policies (his job approval rating in the state hovers around the low 30s), Grimes’s open association with the Clintons has been deemed an insult directed at Obama rather than, as she said, a statement about backing Hillary Clinton’s suddenly very on-message plans for “growing the middle class”.

Clinton, on the other hand, was quite specific on Wednesday about her plans for growing the middle class: it means boosting the economic power of women. Clinton talked about equal pay for women, the importance of raising the minimum wage for women and the effects of the sequester and the government shutdown for women and their children. It’s not inaccurate to say that every candidate spouts pablum about “the middle class” – but it’s perfectly fair to suggest that Clinton and Grimes are able to look in the mirror and see a slightly more feminine vision of who it could (and should) include. This is not just a message; it’s a mission.

That is maybe the point of having female candidates and female office-holders: not the ability to win over the newly-coveted young, single women voters (who are now nearly as popular with pundits and strategists as soccer moms and national security moms and economy moms or whatever category long-time unpopular Clinton aide Mark Penn could come up with), but to get some people into office who don’t see politics, policy and the people they affect in exactly the same way as every single other politician.

Grimes, Nunn, Hagan and Shaheen are all neck-and-neck in the polls against their male challengers – though Grimes, who was called an “empty dress” by a senior Republican party official last year, comes in for the most criticism from the pundit industry, which partially explains Clinton’s relatively early appearance in her state. If the elections were held today, any of those women could lose as easily as they could win ... at which point the party powers that be will almost certainly ask themselves about the wisdom of running women candidates in 2016 on a ballot that might well be led by a woman.

As much as we want one woman to break the glass ceiling, we need to build more than one ladder to the other side of it. Hillary Clinton, at least, seems to be trying.