This Democratic campaign isn’t about breaking the ‘glass ceiling’. Maybe that’s the best way of beating Trump, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes
here are lots of differences between the presidential candidacies of Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, but, rhetorically at least, there’s one disparity that stands out. In 2008, when Clinton lost to Obama in the Democratic primaries, she referred to putting “”. Accepting the Democratic nomination in 2016, she said: “We just put the biggest crack in the glass ceiling.
As a piece of imagery, the glass ceiling got very old very quickly, so that even by the time Clinton had it on heavy rotation, it was already emptied of meaning. Even without the phrase’s “all right, Grandma” vibe, it makes basic political sense for Harris to avoid using an image associated with the failed candidacy of the only other woman to be a major-party nominee for president.
I suspect this comes from studying Clinton’s defeat. Lots of people – not all of them men – don’t like the first-female-president approach. It makes them roll their eyes. It risks triggering either a speech about how girls these days outpace boys at high school and men are the underdog or, from the other direction, the observation that, without a class metric, the designation “woman” is politically meaningless. (It also risks provoking Susan Sarandon to pop up on TVAlso: it’s boring.
Instead, Harris lets the optics do the work for her and wears the various aspects of her identity lightly. “I stood up for women and children against predators who abused them,” she said at the convention, trying to spin her role as a prosecutor away from the cop-like end of the spectrum towards something that sounds more heroic and nurturing.
As for Clinton, God love her, she’s still ploughing on with the glass ceiling thing. At the Democratic convention, she referred to Harris’s candidacy as the “highest, hardest glass ceiling”. And fair play to her. She isn’t wrong, factually, even if politically she may be off base. The fact remains: that if the Harris team’s instincts and calculations are right, it may turn out that the best way to smash the glass ceiling is to ignore it altogether.
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