Ladies’ Night at the DNC
Kamala Harris’ big night was also the Democrats’ invocation of girl power
In the hours before the Democratic National Convention began on Wednesday, all I could think of was that stupid glass ceiling.
You know the one: Hillary Clinton put 18 million metaphorical cracks in it back in 2008. Her face symbolically shattered it at the 2016 convention. It hung over everyone’s head at the Javits Center on the night of Clinton’s presumed victory, until state after state turned red and those almighty symbolic roof panels started to feel more like a cruel joke: Nope, not broken.
Democrats are, notably, not running a female nominee this time around, and the memory of that much-talked-about ceiling is probably why: Reportedly, even when Democratic primary voters preferred female candidates, they were more likely to vote for men, explaining that they didn’t believe their neighbors would vote for a woman. The heavy-handed symbolism of the Clinton campaign seems like hubris now. Yet the Democratic ticket does include a female VP — Kamala Harris, who would not only be the first female VP but the first black and Asian VP as well — and the night leading up to her acceptance speech was pretty transparently (ahem) centered around girl power.
