Did Gerald Ford believe a woman could be elected president?
Over the past decade, we have seen the same dangerously unqualified, fascist, senile maniac defeat two women to the office of President of the United States.
Jury’s out over whether those two women were the best candidates for the job. However, one can be absolutely certain that they would have been a better choice than the kleptocrat currently destroying the highest office in the USA, both literally and metaphorically. 2016 can possibly be chalked up to people voting for an untested quantity and an uninspiring Democratic nominee. However, the result of the 2024 presidential election really does pose the question: Will the USA ever actually elect a female president in our lifetime?
By 2024, America knew exactly who they were dealing with in the form of the GOP nominee. Said GOP nominee swept the swing states over a vastly more qualified female opponent. So, as we’re coming up to two decades after an African American man was elected president, we must ask what it would take for a woman to take the highest office of the land as well? Back in 1989, Gerald Ford was posed the same question by a group of school children and responded with a surprisingly frank answer.
One that sounds dismissive on the surface, yet one that, given everything we’ve learned in the past year, does seem a lot more plausible than actually winning an election. It also softens slightly when you realise that the way into office he’s describing is more or less the way that he entered office.
How did Gerald Ford predict a female US president?
He may have been vastly optimistic about the timing of this course of events, predicting that it would happen in the next four to eight years, adorably enough. However, the rest of his prediction is rather sobering, saying that a female president wouldn’t come through the “normal course of events”. In fact, he describes what a number of people thought would happen from 2020 to 2024.
Gerald Ford said, “Either the Republican or Democrat political party will nominate a man for president and a woman for vice president, and the woman and man will win. In that term of office of the president, the president will die, and the woman will become president under the law, our Constitution.” Ford, a man notable for being the only person to serve as president without winning an election for either President or Vice President, is more or less describing his own journey here.
Thus, it would be a strange self-own if he were being patronising. If anything, he talks about the prospect with an admirable amount of hope, especially coming from someone born before the First World War broke out. He doubles down on his bizarre optimism with his sign-off to this question. He says, “Once that barrier is broken, from then on, men better be careful because they’ll have a hard, hard time ever even getting a nomination in the future.”
I’ll believe it when I see it, Gerry.