The First Woman President?

It has been a rarity in modern political life: a wide-open race for the nomination of both parties. But whatever happens from here on out, this campaign will always be remembered for the emergence of the first serious woman candidate for president: Barack Obama.

Obama is a female candidate for president in the same way that Bill Clinton was the first black president.

It was Toni Morrison who first had the insight. In a 1998 essay in the New Yorker, the Nobel Prize-winning author described Bill Clinton as "the first black president," commenting on his saxophone playing and his displaying "almost every trope of blackness."

Obama doesn't play the sax. But he is pushing against conventional—and political party nominating convention—wisdom in five important ways, with approaches that are usually thought of as qualities and values that women bring to organizational life: a commitment to inclusiveness in problem solving, deep optimism, modesty about knowing all the answers, the courage to deliver uncomfortable news, not taking on all the work alone, and a willingness to air dirty linen. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is taking a more traditional (and male?) authoritarian approach.

Obama is advocating conversation and collaboration—talking with everybody, including those with whom he has significant disagreements. Several of the so-called "gaffes" targeted by Clinton and GOP front runner John McCain have been about Obama's willingness to talk with people we aren't supposed to like, such as various factions in the Middle East.

Clinton's campaign, on the other hand, is centered on the idea that she is the experienced realist. She understands the rules in this man's game of politics and governing, knows how to play by them and win, and can take the heat that inevitably comes with entering the fray. Obama's argument is that he understands the rules and knows how to play by them—but that he wants to change those rules, because they embody values with which he does not agree. He manages to hold his realism and his optimism in constructive tension together, even though it opens him up to the charge that he is naive.