What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (7 page)

MS
: Speaking of numbers, even in other industries, for example the media, I think the statistic is that women hold only 3 percent of clout positions in the media industry, and the numbers that you hear from organizations like the Women’s Media Center are shockingly low in terms of overall
representation of women in all forms of media. How do you also explain the disparity of women in the media and is that something that you think is important?

PM
: I wish I could explain why it is that the overwhelming numbers of consumers of media are women [
laughs]
and the underwhelming numbers of people who are leading and making and creating media are not. The explanation again is that we haven’t done enough for each other, those who are inside media. And then I think there is the very real cultural fact that there are just not that many women who are kind of sticking it out to make it to the top positions. Part of it may be that we haven’t built the networks. And then the other part may be simply that we need to make some conscious noise [
laughs]
, protest. I look at the Women’s Media Center numbers—those seem to be reasons to be in the streets! Reasons to be saying to the networks, “Unacceptable, guys, unacceptable,” especially since they’ll be the first to tell you that 60 percent of the consumers that matter to them are women, so it’s unacceptable. Because really it does have to do with the two things we’ve heard a lot about recently—since Women’s Media Center and Miss Representation and others took on these issues—that representation matters. It matters, the images that we see of women and girls on television and on the Internet. So we can’t be passive again. When are we going to start to take the power that we have as consumers of media and demand that it be different?

And then the underrepresentation is just as significant a problem. If women were in charge or making the decisions about prime-time shows, were the primary writers and producers of most or at least half of the programs . . . would it look different? I think it would.

MS
: I think of all the programs that you make about women, for women—starting with your pioneering series
Woman to Woman
, and now with
She’s Making Media, She’s Making News
—it seems like this is something that you’ve been consciously doing your whole life.

PM
: Yeah, because that was the decision I made early on, that I talked about before. They said, “Don’t do women’s stories; stay as far away from it as you can.” And when I looked around, that was the big missing thing. There were no women’s stories. And every meeting we would have about programming, every single meeting would start with, “We’ve got to do programming that appeals to women.” Well? So where are the women’s programs? So that was my interest, that was what I cared about, and so I’ve always fought for it. But many times throughout my career, if you look at the decisions I had to make, many times I had to leave the networks to do that kind of programming. I didn’t win a lot of the battles inside. And it does take battles. So an easier route is not to fight that way—the path of least resistance is not the one I took.

MS
: There are so many problems right now, not just here, but globally, with everything from global warming to violence against women. What I’m hoping to present in the book is larger than just looking at the case for women’s leadership, which I think sometimes gets misinterpreted like it’s a competition or just about equality. Why
is
it important that women are in greater positions of leadership and influence in the world? What is the bigger picture?

PM
: The bigger picture is that all those problems you mentioned, and all the ones we haven’t mentioned, are just too complex to expect men to figure it out all by themselves. That’s less than half of the population. Why would we go into
anything
as complicated and difficult as those issues you just named—climate change, violence against women—without the whole world engaged in solving the problem? So it’s just a very practical thing.
We need every good mind we can possibly engage and every good leader we can possibly engage. It’s like looking at half a room and saying, “Okay, we don’t need you guys on the problem over here, we can do it without these minds.” We can’t! We can’t. And the fact is that at their very best, at their fullest realization, women bring a different perspective to each and every conversation because we have a different set of experiences. That doesn’t mean we can’t respond exactly as the guy sitting next to us does. I’m not saying we’d have different solutions, but I am saying that sitting at the table trying to solve problems together, we’re going to have a set of experiences that is much fuller and, therefore, is going to help us find a more reliable and effective and long-term solution.

DONNA BRAZILE

“I found that when I was coming up through the political ranks, it wasn’t enough to be the only woman, or sometimes the only minority, in the room; I wanted to make sure that I was not the last. So while I sat at the table, I often told my colleagues, ‘Look, if there’s no room at the table, we’ll just bring in folding chairs. We’ll make space for women.’”

V
ETERAN
D
EMOCRATIC POLITICAL
strategist Donna Brazile is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, a syndicated newspaper columnist, a columnist for
Ms. Magazine
and
O, The Oprah Magazine
, an on-air contributor to CNN and ABC, where she regularly appears on ABC’s
This Week
, and the author of the best-selling memoir
Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics
. Brazile has worked on every presidential campaign from 1976 through 2000, when she became the first African American to manage a presidential campaign. She is currently on the board of the National Democratic Institute, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: It seems like talking about a woman president is a timely topic. Why do you think that is?

DONNA BRAZILE
: This is the right time to talk about it if we’re going to think about 2016 or even 2020; it always projected in my mind that it would take us till 2020. Then again, I never thought we would elect our first black president before 2020. So we’ve made some adjustments already, as a country. The country is ready; the electoral ground is fertile. Now it really takes a candidate, and this is a very strategic moment for women who’ve been thinking about this moment for the last fifty years. We thought about it in 1972 when Chisholm made her run. We thought about it when Pat Schroeder initially tossed her hat in the ring and when Elizabeth Dole tossed her hat in the ring, and of course we thought about it with the selection of Geraldine Ferraro in 1984. And then, of course, we had Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin in 2008. So we’ve had moments before, but we’ve never had the right political ingredients to really stir up the electorate to make it happen, and we finally have them.

One of the things that will matter to this is the marketing and the strategic placement of [the next female] candidate. Back in 2008, the Clinton campaign really downplayed women’s issues. They thought—I’m sure, just like Obama, downplaying race—that the first “viable female candidate” should not be a woman’s candidate. We didn’t really get a good, strong message out of Hillary until, honestly, I believe, until June, when she gave her concession speech. She was a tough candidate. The failure was in marketing her and making sure that she understood that you couldn’t just run a primary-focus campaign; you have to do a constituent-based campaign, in which you have to focus on caucuses as well. . . . I do believe that having that early team of strategists and marketers [is important] because we live in a totally different universe than the one [that existed] when I got involved in my first presidential campaign. Back then, you still had people’s names on three-by-five index cards. Nowadays, they’re in your computer, with analytics driving so much of what we do in politics—knowing what people think, their preferences, what magazines they read, and what
that could possibly tell us about voters . . . not just at the federal level, but also at the state and local levels, precinct levels. There’s so much data out there, and the first female president will have a geek side to her. Because that’s how you can tap into the richness of the new voter experience, the rising American electorate, so to speak. That’s ultimately going to change American politics. This is why you saw the Republicans put out their ninety-seven-page autopsy report.

MS
: Why do you think we have not, as yet, had a woman president?

DB
: Because the country was not ready. The country wasn’t ready in 1972 when Shirley Chisholm went out for her candidacy. The country wasn’t ready in 1988 when Pat Schroeder announced her candidacy. The country wasn’t ready in 2000 with Elizabeth Dole. And the country
was
ready, but Hillary Clinton fell a few votes short of securing the Democratic nomination. The country now is eager to see a woman run and compete successfully for the White House.

MS
: What will it take to make it happen? Do you feel now is the time?

DB
: The political environment has drastically changed. Demographic changes are under way in the country, combined with the fact that the face of leadership is no longer masculine. There are feminine traits that are now accepted, like cooperation, for example. So I do believe the country is ready, and I also believe that the political environment would support a woman seeking the highest office. Of course, it would be helpful if we had a female as a defense secretary, but even in that area—military readiness, commander in chief—women have taken steps to demonstrate that we can handle those types of issues as well.

MS
: Anita Hill said something interesting to me: she wondered whether the first woman who becomes president is going to have to prove her toughness by maybe even being more likely to go to war because of the fact that there’s something to prove being the first woman. Do you think there are going to be certain expectations that may not allow the first woman president to be her authentic self, that she may have to still conform to what we expect from that office?

DB
: If you look around the world at other female heads of state, I don’t think their voters put too much stock in their so-called military experience, but they did take a look at their role in society, their role as leaders in society, and that was a big factor. Perhaps if you look at Merkel in Germany, or even Dilma Rousseff, the current president of Brazil, when you look at models of leadership and what it took to advance women in those societies, many of them did not have the so-called military experience, but what they did have was some type of executive experience, by experiencing government that was transferrable to a new job as head of state.

MS
: The fact that we do have President Obama, who now has been elected twice, do you think that makes it easier, just in terms of opening up diversity in general? Looking at this last election, do you see any hopeful shifts or paradigms emerging?

DB
: When the country elected its first biracial president, we broke the mold in terms of the face of leadership. . . . I think the country is more open to looking at other types of leaders and more diversity in our leadership. We’re having conversations today in 2013 that we didn’t have in 2008 when we did have President Obama, as well as then–Senator Hillary Clinton. Also, if you look at media coverage in 2008, misogyny in the media was at an all-time high, but in 2012 it was a little bit tempered,
perhaps because more women were out there talking as pundits and political analysts and news analysts. But the face of leadership has changed over the last four years, and it will continue to change in the coming years.

MS
: With Hillary’s candidacy, it was a very interesting time to see how she was covered by the media, because it was telling to watch the often-sexist coverage of her. What do you think we learned that was useful from her campaign? What emerged out of that that struck you?

DB
: Well, although she hit that artificial glass ceiling, she made it possible for future candidates, including her, to put together the kind of national organization that can compete, head to head, with any man running in a race. So I think that’s number one. That’s never been done before. The sheer number of primaries and caucuses she won, the fact that she was able to compete, and practically, in my judgment, win all of the presidential debates (maybe with one exception). She clearly has the qualities and traits that people most admire in their national leaders—she’s compelling, she’s smart, she’s decisive. There’s a reason why for, I think, the seventeenth time [she’s been given the title of] the “most admired woman” in this country, because people see her as a model of leadership, and that is a very important step in ultimately running for national office.