North Star Writers Group

The very fact that this question keeps popping up during this endless pre-season to the 2008 campaign is sufficient to doubt a positive answer. Some day American voters may indeed elect a woman as commander in chief, but most likely she will not be Hillary Rodham Clinton – despite her slight lead in amassing campaign cash.

Granted, prediction is highly perilous in a world based on free will and open to all possibilities. It’s an agonizingly long time between now and the first Tuesday of November next year, and a lot could change in the intervening months.

For the present, Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy is a sharp reminder of another woman in politics who became the first (and to this day only) female prime minister of the United Kingdom.

Several years before Margaret Thatcher assumed the role of leader of Britain’s Conservative Party in 1975, there was at least one prediction that she would become Prime Minister some day (which happened in 1979). It came from Margaret Robson, history teacher at the all-girls county grammar (high) school I attended between 1968 and 1972.

Miss Robson’s pupils guffawed at the comment. At that time (circa 1971), Mrs. Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education and Science in the cabinet of Prime Minister Edward Heath. She had just cut universal free milk for school children aged seven to 11 and was rewarded with the unflattering sobriquet, “Margaret Thatcher - the milk snatcher.” She was not yet a Conservative Party insider and few observers thought she would go very far.

Miss Robson stood her ground, insisting that Mrs. Thatcher could become Prime Minister precisely because she was a conservative. According to Miss Robson, a most astute interpreter of history, Mrs. Thatcher’s political philosophy offered the British electorate reassuring balance against the radical step of voting for a woman. It would be too much change all at once to ask voters to accept a female leader who was also a liberal.

Fast forward to the present. Miss Robson’s prediction just played out in France, where the highest voter turnout since 1981 delivered the presidency to another Conservative, Nicolas Sarkozy, succeeding Jacques Chirac. Despite her reassuringly traditional last name, his opponent, Segolene Royal, was a Socialist – and a woman, the first serious female candidate for France’s highest political office. According to the Associated Press, polls revealed that French voters saw the uncompromising Sarkozy as more competent, with a better economic plan.

Turning to this country, Mrs. Clinton’s reputation is that of a liberal. The right has tried to tar her with the L-word ever since her husband assumed the presidency in 1992. She’s not really all that liberal, except to those whose politics are on the far right of Attila the Hun. Call her centrist or left-of-center at best.

There is one big difference between Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Thatcher. Every one of the former’s public pronouncements sounds as though it has been first offered to a focus group and then neutered by a political consultant. She’s trying to be all things to all people, and so ends up as nothing much to anyone.

Not so Mrs. Thatcher, who often spoke her mind forcefully – like Mr. Sarkozy. As leader of the Conservative opposition in 1976, she denounced the old Soviet Union in such harsh terms that the Red Star newspaper and then Radio Moscow dubbed her “Iron Lady,” a would-be insult that she embraced and turned into a positive.

Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Thatcher do share one trait: They were/are polarizing figures either loved or reviled, with not much in between.

Moving many people to detest her did not hurt Mrs. Thatcher’s rise to power, but it may doom Mrs. Clinton’s quest for the presidency. That’s because Mrs. Clinton lacks a political philosophy to function as a counterweight to her groundbreaking gender, which my former history teacher knew so well was critical to allaying the public’s fears about voting for a woman.

When this country finally does elect a female president, she will probably sound a lot more like Margaret Thatcher than Hillary Clinton - or Segolene Royal.

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