Hillary Clinton And Kamala Harris Exposed America’s Glass Ceiling.

Hillary Clinton And Kamala Harris Exposed America’s Glass Ceiling.

(ThyBlackMan.com) I have been watching this country choose its leaders for longer than I care to put in print, and if you do that long enough you start to notice the things that nobody says out loud. There is a quiet in American politics, a thing that lives underneath the speeches and the polling and the cable noise, and every so often somebody comes along who makes that quiet audible. Hillary Clinton did it. Kamala Harris did it again. Two different women, two different generations, and the country gave them more or less the same answer.

Understand this is no tribute. Both of these women ran campaigns with real holes in them. Both made decisions you could argue with until the sun came up. I am not here to sand the edges off either one. I am here to talk about what their careers revealed, because what they revealed is bigger than the two of them put together.

Start with the resumes, since folks love to pretend these women just floated up out of nowhere. Hillary sat in the United States Senate representing New York. She ran the State Department as the nation’s top diplomat, shaking hands with kings and warlords on the country’s behalf. Before that came eight years inside the White House, and decades in public life stacked on top of those. In 2016 she won the popular vote by nearly three million ballots. Won it outright. Then watched the keys to the building get handed to a man who had never held any office of any kind, ever. Sit with that arithmetic for a second.

Now bring up Kamala. District attorney in San Francisco. Attorney general of the most populous state in the union, running an entire justice apparatus. United States senator. Then vice president, the first woman ever to hold that office, the first Black woman, the first daughter of immigrants from that part of the world to climb anywhere near so high. When the sitting president stepped aside in the summer of 2024, she picked up a national campaign with a little more than a hundred days left on the clock and made it far more competitive than many expected.

By any measuring stick this country claims to respect, these were serious people. Credentialed, tested, steeped in the work, the kind of preparation we say we want. And here is the part that ought to keep you up at night. None of it protected them. In certain rooms, the preparation itself seemed to count against them.

You heard it with Hillary in that one little word everybody reached for and nobody could ever quite define. Trust. Folks did not trust her. Ask them why and watch the sentence fall apart in their mouths. There was always a feeling, a vibe, a sense that she wanted it too much, that she had been planning too long, that her drive had a smell to it. Funny thing about that. We have never once held a man’s hunger against him the same way. A fellow who spends thirty years angling for the top job gets called determined. A woman who does the identical thing gets called calculating, cold, somehow not to be trusted for the sin of wanting what she wanted.

And before anybody points the finger only at the other side of the aisle, hold on right there. Some of the loudest doubt came from people who would swear on a stack of Bibles they believe in equality. Young folks on the left who decided she was the lesser of two evils and said it with a curl in the lip. Self-styled progressives who found her insufficiently pure, who could forgive a flawed man his sins in the name of the larger cause but could not extend that same mercy to her. The enthusiasm just was not there, they kept saying, as if enthusiasm falls out of the sky and not out of the way you choose to talk about somebody for a year and a half.

Then comes Kamala, a whole different person, younger, a prosecutor by trade, Black and Indian and Californian, and you would think a fresh face might get a fresh hearing. She did not get one. That song changed key but the melody held. What has she even done, people asked, about a person who had run a giant state’s legal machinery and sat one heartbeat from the Oval Office for four straight years. They mocked her laugh. Her sentences got clipped and labeled word salad. And somehow she had not earned the nomination, never mind the long climb behind her. The standard kept sliding away from her, the way it always does, just far enough out ahead that her fingers could never quite close around it.

Now I promised you honesty, so here it comes. Hillary made mistakes that were hers and nobody else’s. She took the industrial Midwest for granted and it cost her the whole thing. The business with the private email server was a wound she handed herself, and her response to it never once landed clean. Clinton could be guarded in a way that read as evasive even when she had nothing in the world to hide. Those are fair criticisms and I will not pretend otherwise.

Kamala carried her own weight too. Her first try at the presidency back in 2019 collapsed before a single vote got cast, and that was a failure of message and money and machinery all at once. As vice president she got handed thankless assignments and did not always rise above them in the public eye. The 2024 campaign was strapped to an administration the country had soured on, and a little more than a hundred days is simply not enough time to outrun four years of grocery prices and grievance. All true. All fair game on the table.

But here is where the honest man has to keep walking instead of stopping at the convenient spot. You can grant every one of those criticisms, every single solitary one, and you still cannot account for the whole picture with them. Because when you line up two of the most prepared candidates either party has offered this century against the welcome they actually received, the gap does not close. Something is left over. Something that has no name inside any one race but becomes impossible to ignore once you have watched it play out twice in your own lifetime.

I will tell you what that leftover thing is, since I have lived long enough to know it on sight. It is the unease this country still carries about a woman holding genuine command over it. Forget the symbolic sort. Forget the first lady sort, the supportive sort, the standing graceful beside her husband sort. The other sort. The sort where she is the one giving the orders, the one whose finger rests near the button, the one the generals salute. America says it is ready for that. America has been saying it is ready for a good while now. Its conduct keeps telling a different story than its mouth.

And I will be straight about why I read it so quick. Black folks have been measuring the distance between what this country promises and what this country delivers since long before I drew breath. We know this dance by heart. Not this one. Not now. Not yet. There is always a reason, and the reason always sounds reasonable in the moment, and the goalpost is always somewhere just over yonder, a step or two past your reach. You hear that same sliding standard laid on a candidate because she is female and the hair stands up on your neck, because you have heard the tune before, in a different room, aimed at a different soul.

What makes it sting worse, and I do mean worse, is how much of the resistance dressed itself up as friendship. The right was at least honest about its hostility. You knew exactly where you stood with it. Harder to swallow was the squeamishness rolling off the people waving the progress banner, the ones who wanted a lady in the office in the abstract but flinched from the actual flesh and blood candidates who showed up to claim it. They wanted somebody who would win without seeming to want it, who would lead without appearing to reach, who would be tough but never threatening and warm but never soft and ready but never eager. No such creature has ever existed. What they craved was a ghost.

So here we sit, two campaigns and eight years apart, and the verdict rhymes. A nation that swears up and down it has no trouble with a lady in charge has now twice declined to put one there, reaching past stacked credentials to do it both times. I am not claiming gender was the only thing standing in those rooms. Plenty was standing in those rooms. What I am saying is that it was in there too, and the people most invested in pretending it was not are the very ones who most need to look at it dead in the eye.

The denial is the tell. A country truly at ease with female authority would feel no need to keep announcing how at ease it is. It would just elect her and go on about its business. That has not happened, and the reason it has not happened is the precise thing the country keeps swearing up and down is not present. Hillary found it. Kamala found it after her. Both learned the lesson the hardest way there is, in front of everybody, on the biggest stage we have got.

The rest of us got to stand there and watch. What still hangs in the air is whether we took anything from it, or whether we are simply waiting on the next more than qualified woman to come along and teach us the same old lesson one more sorry time.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.