A recurring dialog these days, both in the press and in my personal life, concerns the question “is America ready for a women president?”

The general answer, from many folks I know, seems to be no.

Frankly this surprises me. My daughter is growing up in world where the notion that women are fundamentally incapable of achieving anything, discouraged or precluded from trying, or operating in a system biased against them is completely foreign to her. In public school, she is surrounded by teachers and administrators who are chronically concerned about girls’ self-image and roles models. At home, her parents neither reinforce nor condemn any particular career or family aspirations she might have and encourage her to try everything to find her passion.

The same cannot be said of my mother’s generation.

It occurred to me that that I’ve been misunderstanding the conversation. What is really being discussed is not equal opportunity or open mindedness in America but the implication that women who aspire to leadership are, by nature, more likely to be philosophically inclined toward the growth of the nanny state at the expense of freedom. I’m going to ignore the track record of my own state of WA, and choose not to believe this. I know lots of men who feel bad that America still trails the more enlightened societies of Europe and Canada.

Margaret Thatcher was a women.

It has occurred to me that if my job was to devise a strategy to get a pro-nanny state/anti freedom women elected to the presidency, this is what I would do:

I would try to create a block of single issue women voters where the issue is the anger.  When it was convenient, I would use the argument that women and men are, at birth, interchangeable blank slates. Any differences they might exhibit in life are therefore entirely the result of conditioning. I would then inventory a set of issues where there seems to be a wealth/power/happiness/whatever imbalance and blame it on the perpetual  unseen but ever powerful patriarchy.  If the inventory was too small, I would invent issues out of whole cloth.

I would then try to create a block of utopian nanny state voters by  emphasizing the fundamental differences between women and men. I would try to create the feeling and belief, via subtle indoctrination and propaganda, that much of  the violence and suffering in the world is a result of men being politically “in charge” and being fundamentally violent.  This is a potentially large voter block, in that the argument is believable to both men and women.

Finally, I would appeal to a combination of guilt and chivalry of the remaining men that women have not yet accomplished “enough”, and that the best way to for them to help is to elect a nanny state women.

It might work.

Mike.