(HOST) With a woman and a black man now the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, veteran ABC News correspondent and commentator Barrie Dunsmore, says that gender and race may now be unavoidable campaign issues.
(DUNSMORE) While the Founding Fathers might be forgiven because they were products of their times, it’s a simple fact that the Constitution they produced was highly discriminatory against women and African-Americans. To say the original document was both racist and misogynist is not a stretch. It took a civil war before black men would finally get the vote in 1870. Women of all races would have to wait another fifty years until 1920 before they could cast their ballots.
Even then – it wasn’t until the 1960’s – when the women’s liberation movement and black-led civil rights groups joined together to march and demonstrate and fight – that something akin to legal equality was finally achieved. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, of course, beneficiaries and products of that long struggle for equality. For either one to become President of the United States would be a major event in the nation’s history.
Considering that history, the issues of race and gender are never going to be far from the surface as the politicking goes on – right now for the nomination and then for the Presidency itself. We have seen a flare-up in the past week, when the campaigns of both Clinton and Obama have appeared to be playing the race card. Given the damage that both could suffer from such warfare, the two candidates themselves wisely called a truce and blamed the problem on their surrogates. By Tuesday’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, civility had returned, and both Hillary and Barack, as they referred to each other that night, promised to continue their run without resorting to tactics that involve even subliminal references to gender or race.
But, as desirable as this may be, I think we have to be realistic. Many African- Americans will find it nearly impossible to escape the attraction of the once impossible dream of having a black man in the White House.
Likewise, many women feel that electing the first female President would be the ultimate smashing of the glass-ceiling that continues to limit the progress of women in some parts of the academic and business worlds.
We have already seen how women rescued Senator Clinton in New Hampshire, and we are very likely to see Senator Obama do well as a result of a substantial black vote in South Carolina next week.
Once each party has selected its Presidential candidate, regardless of who is chosen, I fully expect that race and/or gender will be a factor in the fall campaign. Old prejudices – inherent in the American body politic from its inception – die very hard.
However, one can take some comfort from the fact that a sizeable part of America seems to want to shake free of these prejudices. And if in November a black man or a white woman should be elected to the highest office in the land – that would represent huge progress in human rights for all Americans. It would also be enthusiastically applauded virtually everywhere in the world.