Is America Ready?

First, they have to run the gauntlet. Hillary's big problem might be less her sex than her husband's--the risk that despite a powerful nostalgia for his intelligence and competence, Bill Clinton's sexual history and its myriad complications for her public persona will somehow intrude in ways that feel very yesterday. Will fatigue with the less attractive side of the Clinton years--the soap opera, sinning and self-absorption--resurface? Hard-core Hillary haters of both genders aren't going away.

Obama hasn't yet brought out the haters. "He's scarier than she is because nobody says a bad word about him," says a former senior aide to President Bush who doesn't want to be quoted speculating about Democrats. But that's partly because he's so untested. Obama's problem may be less that he's black than that he's green--the least battle-hardened major candidate in modern memory; "Obambi," as one Chicago columnist called him. Although lack of experience usually counts in politics only if it leads to serious error, his thin record could offer a handy excuse to those who consider President Barack Hussein Obama too exotic for their tastes. On the other hand, under what might be called the "dog years" theory of politics, a year of intense campaigning before the primaries might make the country feel as if it had known him for seven.

Theodore Sorensen, JFK's adviser and speechwriter, says, "He [Obama] reminds me in many ways of Kennedy in 1960. The pundits said he was Catholic and too young and inexperienced and wasn't a member of the party's inner circle. They forgot that the nomination wasn't decided in Washington but out in the field."

Polling on women and blacks in leadership suggests sharply improved prospects for both, though it's impossible to say how much respondents lie or are affected by their feelings about specific candidates. According to a new NEWSWEEK Poll, 86 percent of registered voters would vote for a qualified woman candidate for president if their party nominated one, and 93 percent say the same for a qualified African-American. These are much higher numbers than those of a generation ago.

But when asked about other people--whether "America is ready to elect a woman president"--only 55 percent say yes, with 7 percent fewer women than men answering in the affirmative. For an African-American presidential candidate, 56 percent of voters say America is ready, with more blacks than whites claiming not. This corresponds to anecdotal evidence of women's being among the most skeptical of Hillary's prospects and blacks unconvinced that Obama can go the distance. Their personal experience with obstacles leads them to lengthen the odds. The difference, which might favor Obama, is that women do not vote in disproportionate numbers for women candidates, while blacks tend to cast their vote for blacks, as long as they're viable Democrats.

In the abstract, the country seems disposed to elect a woman before an African-American. Women first won the constitutional right to vote in 1920, half a century after blacks (theoretically) received the franchise, but women have progressed further. In 1974, Ella Grasso of Connecticut became the first woman elected governor without having been the spouse or widow of one. The United States, where 51 percent of the population is female, now includes 9 women governors, 71 women House members and a record 16 women out of 100 in the Senate. Beginning in Sri Lanka in 1960, more than 40 nations have chosen women as heads of state (usually through the parliamentary system)--most recently in Chile, macho land of Pinochet, where voters in 2006 comfortably elected Michelle Bachelet as president.