What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (19 page)

MS
: I know that it’s important to have more women in Congress, but it’s also important to get the women who are there to head up committees
and have more positions of power there. I had done an interview with Nancy Pelosi, and I remember her calling it a “marble ceiling.” Do you feel that way? Do you feel the weight of the obstacles? And do you have a sense that it is improving? Do you see signs of progress, especially since this last election?

CM
: Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, if you’ve been doing this for as long as I have, it would be
really
irresponsible to say we haven’t made major progress. My campaign manager—and it was one of the most difficult and high-profile races in the country—the person who ran the whole show was a woman. That didn’t happen thirty years ago in U.S. Senate campaigns. You look at our leadership team and you’ve got Patty Murray heading up the Gang of Six to try to get a solution to the fiscal problem, and then you have her as chairman of the Budget Committee handling the budget on the floor of the Senate. Obviously, there has never been a woman Budget chair before. We now have women chairing a number of committees that are not what I used to call, when I was a young legislator in my state capitol, “the soft stuff.” We have a man on Health and Labor and Welfare, but we have a woman chairing the Intelligence Committee. And we have a woman chairing the Appropriations Committee for the first time in the history of the Senate. We have a woman chairing the Budget Committee for the first time in the history of the Senate. So there are clearly opportunities that are opening up and women are stepping up to handle these jobs. I just think it’s a matter of time. I’m very hopeful we get a woman president in 2016. I’m very hopeful that Secretary Clinton decides to run. I think all of us are very excited about that.

MS
: I’m hopeful we will reach those milestones, too. Now, part of this book is to help encourage women to pursue leadership positions and certainly to enter politics. It can seem very daunting and also a little dispiriting. Some
people look at Washington right now and say it’s so dysfunctional and such a hard process to run for office. What words of advice or encouragement would you have for a young woman who is considering pursuing this?

CM
: As I tell kids when I give high school graduation speeches, success is not what you have, it is loving what you do. For thirty-plus years I’ve looked forward to getting out of bed because of what the day would bring. It is an intellectual challenge, it is incredibly interesting, very different, it’s
impossible
to become bored, nothing is ever routine—just when you think you’ve seen it all, something else happens that’s extraordinary and different. You have a real chance to see and touch things you’ve been able to change that have made a positive impact on people’s lives. I just don’t know that it gets any better than that. Now, does it suck? Yeah. There are parts of it that are terrible. The guilt that I had was not unlike what any working mom feels. I did everything in public office—I married, I had children, I divorced, I remarried. My children are now . . . the youngest is twenty-one. Did I feel bad that I couldn’t be at everything that they were doing? Yeah, I did; I felt terrible. On the other hand, I in some ways had more flexibility than many of my peers that were working in big law firms, because if you are going to take off in the middle of the day at a law firm, you’re accountable to someone. You’ve got to go say to your partner that you’re working with, “I need to go to my daughter’s Valentine’s Day homeroom party because I’m bringing the cupcakes.” You know, I could do that and there wasn’t really a “boss” I had to check in with. Now, I also had to get up on Saturday morning and load all the kids in the car and take them to give a speech with me. And one of my favorite stories is when my son, my oldest, was about six and his younger sister was four. You know, when kids are that age, they think they’re whispering and they’re not really whispering very well, and he was trying to whisper in the next room, and he said, “Now listen, Maddy, if she says we’re going to a party, ask her if
somebody’s going to make a speech, because if they make a speech, it’s not a party” [
laughs]
. They were used to me loading them in the car and saying, “Come on, we’ve got to go to a party,” and of course, we’d get there and the three of them would be going, “Uh, Mom, not so much.” So, you know, yes, I had to work at night, and I was a single mom for nine years of that period, when my kids were young, so it was challenging. But it’s no more challenging for somebody in elected office than it is for any woman who decides to have a career working outside the home. You’ve got to be very organized. You’ve got to not sweat the small stuff. And you have to learn to live with some guilt. That lifts like a magic cloud when they all are off at college [
laughs]
. And you get the wonderful moment that I’ve had with all three of my children, who have said to me, “Thank you for giving us the confidence to be independent,” and they all are out doing their own thing in far-flung places and have been incredibly self-sufficient and confident. And they’re nice enough to say—it may not be true—but they’re nice enough to say to me that they think in part that was because they were expected to do things on their own from a fairly young age. And part of that was because they had to [
laughs]
.

But I really think women should be much more excited about a career in elective office. It’s a tough business, yes, but most are, and there is just an incredible upside. And it is achievable. Really, a lower office, which is where you start . . . my race for state representative, I didn’t have any money. I had no particular family pedigree that put me on a path to winning. Nobody ever tapped me on the shoulder and said it was my turn. I learned that knocking on doors was essential, and I knocked on 11,432 doors. And I won! And at the lower levels, offices like city council and school board and state representative and mayor in smaller size communities—you can do a lot of it with shoe leather, and especially now with social media, which was not available to me in the late seventies and early eighties. I just really hope that women—as they see more and
more women in the United States Senate, and hopefully as president—I hope they aspire to holding elective office. Our country really needs it.

MS
: As you’re saying, a career in elected office does require a lot of work and you have to have fuel for that. Where do your own passion and commitment come from? What drives you? What’s the source of your energy?

CM
: That’s a really good question, and I really do think that God blessed me with a high level of energy. I’ve always been kind of pushing from a fairly young age—I was trying to figure out a way to organize things, or to do more. And I’m intellectually curious, and I did figure out very early on that knowledge was power. So this thirst for knowing more about a lot of things is a real natural way to feed my work on public policy, so they kind of feed off each other. When you have the opportunity to impact public policy, the fact that you’re very interested in it is an engine—whether it’s fixing the sexual assault problem in our military, or whether it’s solving the contracting problem that our Federal Government has . . . and then I guess you kind of get addicted to when it works and you actually can [make a change]. I was part of the initial drug court movement and I watched drug courts go from a good idea to literally a worldwide phenom that changed drug treatment in this country forever. You know, that’s
extraordinarily
special that you have a chance to be part of something like that. And it gets you all jazzed for the next great big moment of finding the good idea that can help people.

OLYMPIA SNOWE

“Young people, mostly young females, want to immerse themselves in public service or to engage in some kind of either public or civic aspect of life, but they’re not so sure where they can measure their contributions in political office, and whether or not they can contribute to the extent that they desire to contribute in public service. They see there are other forms of public service that might be more rewarding and enriching and fulfilling than serving in political office where you are accomplishing little. But I tell them we can’t change without them.”

F
ORMER
U.S. S
ENATOR
Olympia J. Snowe served in the U.S. Senate from 1995–2013 and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Maine’s Second Congressional District, from 1979–1995. She was the first woman in American history to serve in both houses of a state legislature and both houses of Congress. When first elected to Congress in 1978, at the age of thirty-one, Olympia Snowe was the youngest Republican woman, and the first Greek American woman, ever elected to Congress. While in the House, she co-chaired the Congressional Caucus on Women’s Issues for ten years.

During Snowe’s distinguished career, she served as chair and then ranking member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, became the first Republican woman ever to secure a full-term seat on the Senate Finance Committee, and was also the first
woman senator to chair the Subcommittee on Seapower of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Navy and Marine Corps. In 2005 she was named the 54th most powerful woman in the world by
Forbes
magazine. In 2006
Time
magazine named her one of the top ten U.S. senators. She is currently chairman and CEO of Olympia Snowe, LLC, through which she provides communications and policy advice, and a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. She is the author of
Fighting for Common Ground: How We Can Fix the Stalemate in Congress
.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: Why do you think we’ve not yet had a woman president, and what do you think it will take to make that happen? Do you think we’re ready for that?

OLYMPIA SNOWE
: Well, I do think we’re ready and prepared. I think in the past, if we look back over the campaigns, there hasn’t been a sufficient number to have run or frankly, in a place to run. I think in looking back at history, you have to have more women running to even get to a place where the country is focused on a female candidate for president. And there have been too few women in public office—that would be one of the areas in which a candidate obviously could begin that process. Certainly that’s been true for men over the years; not necessarily the prerequisite to running for the presidency, but certainly from one of the positions of public office—whether it was a United States senator, or it was governor, or from a higher position on the outside—but for the most part, they were catapulted from positions of high public office that put them in a position to run for the presidency. So I think in the past, we just haven’t had a sufficient number of women in a position to run, frankly. You just didn’t have
a bench, in some ways, and secondly, there just weren’t enough women serving in public office that might have been a natural pivot point for the presidency. I think that obviously has changed, and I think that one person who has illustrated that change was Hillary Clinton.

MS
: I think about the fact that you were on the Senate Armed Services Committee—I think that women also being seen on those kinds of committees is really important and is maybe why we can envision Hillary there, so we can envision a woman as commander in chief or think she is tough enough to be in that role.

OS
: I think it’s going to depend on the person; I really do. And ultimately the breadth of experience that they bring to that position. I think that’s important. Having served on Foreign Intelligence and Armed Services, Foreign Affairs for the better part of my career, probably twenty-four years worth, I have the experience in those categories—people aren’t exposed to women with those views, as much as they are men. I think it’s interesting—could women today have as little experience going in to run for the presidency? That will be the test. In fact, even President Obama or other candidates, President Bush, if you think about it, had to have the same or equivalent experience to run for public office and be viewed as a credible candidate for office. I think a lot will depend on how [women] perform and what their positions are. Much more so because the exposure today is so much different than it was in the past.

MS
: Do you think it’s more challenging for women? Do you think there are specific challenges for Republican women?

OS
: I would say, yes. We’re not doing well with women, but the same is true within the party. We’ve got a lot of work to do. I think that’s true
for where they have women in positions in the party, you know, whether it’s chairs of committees. Frankly, in the House of Representatives, I think that in terms of current positions of leadership, they have a ways to go.