WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) Part of the inevitability meme dominating the discussion about Hillary Clinton running for president in 2016 is that it is time or even past time for a woman to be president of the United States.
No one is suggesting, of course, that just any woman should be president, but, as it happens, this story line goes, Clinton also happens to be the best-qualified candidate as well as being a woman.
This is why she must run, and why she will win, according to her fans.
She has reservations about pursuing the presidency, is the headline for an op-ed by Gail Sheehy this week in the New York Daily News, but ultimately cant resist the call of history.
After Clinton came so close in 2008 and urged women to fight together for what can still be, Sheehy wrote, the former First Lady is almost duty bound to run.
Could Hillary betray the hopes of women the world over and dash the dreams of their daughters? Sheehy said. I hear women everywhere saying, If she doesnt run, Id never forgive her. And Hillary, it seems almost certain, would never forgive herself.
Sheehy, whose Passages books chronicled the importance of social transitions as the author herself grew older, wrote a biography of Hillary Clinton in 1999, Hillarys Choice, that was controversial but generally sympathetic.
At 76, Sheehy is a decade older than Clinton but typical of a generation of women who bear the traces of the Kate Millett-Gloria Steinem wave of feminism. Many of them are ready to rally around a well-qualified woman candidate to turn those 18 million cracks from the 2008 campaign into a real break through the glass ceiling.
Carl Cannon at Real Clear Politics sees the historical momentum as virtually ineluctable. It was only the more pressing opportunity for voters to atone at least in part for the legacy of slavery by picking Barack Obama over Clinton in 2008 that delayed her rendezvous with destiny.
But now it is her turn, he says, rejecting those who question whether Clinton will run, or get the nomination, or win the general election.
Read more:
Darrell Delamaide's Political Capital: History may be inevitable, but Hillary isnt