Hillary, Obama, and Richardson: The New Faces of U.S. Politics

    As the 2008 U.S. presidential election slides past first gear, I realize that the political landscape today is finally at least somewhat representative of the electorate in this country.


    While the Republican candidates for president remain—mostly—of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) stronghold, with Rudy Giuliani adding some Italian-American spice, the announced Democratic candidates for the next White House represent a wider spectrum of the American human experience than ever before.


    Hillary Rodham Clinton represents a majority—that is, the majority of the American population that identifies with the female sex. Barack Obama, son of a white woman from Kansas and an African man from Kenya, represents the growing portion of Americans who blur the lines of race, ethnicity, and cultural background; he represents a post-civil rights movement United States. Bill Richardson, the Mexican-American governor of New Mexico, fits that role, too, and will likely motivate many Hispanic voters to vote in the Democratic primaries.


    In a way, I have to ask: What took so long? And on the other hand, I must ask myself: Is the average American voter ready?


    When I ponder the answer to the first question, I come to the conclusion that it had to take this long. Paradigm shifts take time—a long time. Americans have never been as comfortable as they are today with the idea that a woman or a person of non-white background can run the country efficiently, intelligently, and assertively.


    So I can comfortably assert that strides have been made in the average American voter’s psyche—but is it going to translate into Clinton, Obama or Richardson winning the Democratic presidential nomination?


    I ask this because I often hear friends who, like me, believe that the aforementioned three candidates are the strongest in the pool of declared Democratic nominees. However, they worry that the Democratic party may not want to take the “risk” of nominating a “divisive”—read: “unfamiliar, new”—figure as their presidential candidate against the Republican nominee, who will most certainly be a white man. (Just as all forty-three presidents this country have been.)


    I believe the Democratic party is in a unique position to make this great, very necessary stride. The Republican party has squandered its appeal with the lies relating to and the mismanaging of the war in Iraq; not to mention their poor performance on domestic issues such as health care and all questions relating to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Democratic alternative is more appealing than ever to the Republican voter.


    That a woman, an African-American man, or an Hispanic man may come to represent that alternative is exciting. And I think that 2008 will be the year where one of those three candidates will earn the Democratic nomination and, what is more, take hold of the White House—because that candidate will deserve it and because the American electorate will deserve and demand it.