Vol. 9: So you want a woman in the White House?
I’ve found the ideal candidate. Just one problem…..
“There’s a new sheriff in town,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced last month, upon seizing control of Walt Disney World for the crime of disagreeing with his ideas about education and entertainment.
Not to be outdone, former president Donald Trump this month told the Conservative Political Action Conference, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
(At least he didn’t say, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Maybe next week.)
Are you as excited as I am by these swaggering macho testosterone displays among presidential candidates? Do you yearn for a potential president endowed with such nurturing qualities as maturity, quiet determination, personal warmth, friendly persuasion, and respect for one’s adversaries?
Do you hunger, in short, for a woman in the White House?
No, no— I’m not thinking of a wannabee male like Kari Lake, the sore loser candidate for governor of Arizona, who refused to accept her 2022 defeat and recently declared, “Kari Lake is on the warpath.”
Nor am I thinking of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the abrasive Congressperson from Georgia, who remarked on a video, “Joe Biden, you are not a president, you are a piece of shit.”
Nor am I thinking of Congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who posted a photo of her family, including her small children, holding rifles in front of a Christmas tree.
These faux Amazons seem determined to prove that women can be just as juvenile and combative as men.
I am thinking of the astonishing but not really surprising finding that, during the Covid pandemic, countries run by women (like, say, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand, Lithuania, Estonia, Iceland, and Tunisia) experienced lower rates of infection and death than countries run by men. That doesn’t necessarily prove that women make better political leaders. But it does suggest that citizens who are inclined to elect women to high political office will also be inclined to respond more sensibly to health crises, and perhaps to other crises as well.
Highly qualified, but….
But enough gender generalizing. I am happy to report that I have found the ideal female candidate for President of the United States. She is not Nikki Haley. Nor is she Kamala Harris, Hilary Clinton, or Elizabeth Warren. My candidate is Jennifer Granholm, the former two-term governor of Michigan, currently Biden’s Secretary of Energy.
Rarely has anyone so qualified for America’s highest office come on the scene. Granholm is intelligent, articulate, honest, personable, idealistic, attractive (she won a beauty pageant in California when she was 18) and possessed of a broad range of experiences, administrative and otherwise. Even George Santos can’t match her résumé— and unlike Santos, Granholm’s is the real deal.
She was a popular two-term governor of Michigan, a gritty battleground state. Before that she was Michigan’s attorney general. She was a Phi Beta Kappa at the University of California at Berkeley and earned her law degree from Harvard with honors. During a year in France after college, she helped smuggle clothes and medical supplies to Jews in the Soviet Union and became involved in the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. After stepping down as governor, she contributed regular segments on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CNN. She was one of Biden’s least controversial cabinet nominees, winning support from labor unions, environmental groups, and even some Republicans. As Secretary of Energy, last year Granholm took the courageous step of clearing the late physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, aka the "father of the atomic bomb," whose security clearance was revoked during the Red scare in 1954 due to what Granholm rightly concluded was a "flawed investigation.”
She’s also blessed with a self-deprecating sense of humor. When asked in 2021 how she would increase oil production in the United States, Granholm laughingly replied: "That is hilarious. Would that I had the magic wand on this.”
Imagine Trump or DeSantis responding so undefensively.
To my mind, Granholm is easily the best of all the potential 2024 candidates. I would vote for her in a heartbeat. But I can’t. for one archaic reason: Through no fault of her own, Granholm was born in Vancouver, Canada, just north of the U.S. border. As a foreign-born, she is precluded by the U.S. Constitution from ever serving as President.
No matter that Granholm has lived in the U.S. since the age of four. At 64, she’s been an American much longer than, say, Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis. Nevertheless, she can’t run for President, and I can’t vote for her. And neither can you.
Fear of King George
The Founding Fathers prohibited anyone of foreign birth from serving as president for fear that King George III or one of his British proxies might stage a coup. That seems unlikely today. But the larger issue, it seems to me, is that this Constitutional provision may be depriving us of the high-quality presidential candidates that we deserve.
Albert M. Greenfield, the 20th-Century Russian-born Philadelphia real estate tycoon and advisor to four presidents, often argued that immigrants make the best citizens, because they appreciate American values more than the natives. Greenfield may have a point. John Peter Altgeld, the courageous late-19th-Century reform governor of Illinois, comes to mind: He might have been a great U.S. President, had he not been born in Germany. (Altgeld’s parents brought him to America when he was all of three months old.)
Maybe we need to cast a wider net. Would “Americans by choice” make better Presidents than Americans whose prime qualification is that they were born here? Would women make better presidents than men? And how will we find out?
Of course, if you’re content with candidates like Trump, DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Kamala Harris, or even Joe Biden, forgive me for wasting your time.