The Plague that Will Lead to the 1st Female US President

Various studies and resulting public opinion have noted that female world leaders have handled the COVID-19 crisis better. This fact contributed to Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate, and that will be the case in 2024 as well.

In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, the Republican candidate, John McCain, chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate. On paper, the process seemed like the brainchild of his advisers, who came up with her name. McCain, at 72, needed a youthful, energetic figure at his side as he confronted 47-year-old Barack Obama. Palin, 44, was the governor of Alaska. She was a former beauty pageant contestant, an enthusiastic deer hunter and injected youth into McCain’s campaign.

And then came a string of missteps and unfortunate remarks, which generated ridicule among Americans. One of those missteps occurred during Palin’s interview with Katie Couric from CBS. Palin was asked about the newspapers that she reads, and she said, “All of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.”

Palin was the second woman to run for vice president of the U.S. The first was Geraldine Ferraro, who ran with Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984. They lost the race, and American political history did not seem to look kindly on male-female tickets.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was the Democratic presidential candidate. Donald Trump claimed that the Clinton’s nomination stemmed from reverse discrimination. “If Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5% of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card, and the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her,” Trump said.

Clinton won 3 million more votes than Trump, but she lost in the Electoral College.

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate after consulting with advisers. What stuck was the issue of selecting a woman who could replace the 78-year-old president in the middle of his term if he became ill. Would she be able to deal with one of the worst health and economic crises in American history?

It is possible that consideration of the success female world leaders have had in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to this decision. The names are well known: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern; Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen; German Chancellor Angela Merkel; Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen; Finish Prime Minister Sanna Marin and Norway Prime Minister Erna Solberg, all of whom flattened the COVID-19 curves in their countries. And then there are the failures of huge countries headed by men who were characterized as “strong,” like Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro.

Uma Kambhampati, professor of economics at the University of Redding in Britain, and Supriya Garikipati, a professor of economics at the University of Liverpool, compared data from 194 countries about each country’s COVID-19 response. The economists took the size of the population, gross domestic product, spending on health care, gender equality and the size of the elderly population into account. In their research published at the end of August, they found that countries under the leadership of women dealt with the virus better. Not only were the numbers of people infected lower than in countries led by men, but the death toll was decidedly lower.

According to the study’s findings, it seems that female leaders approach the crisis by prioritizing saving lives over saving the economy, and use greater emotional intelligence to identify and empathize better with what the public is going through. Of course, one has to consider that pandemic data change all the time, and that there are female leaders in only about 10% of the countries in the world, which equals about 4% of the world’s population — a pretty small sample, and not statistically significant.

Despite these drawbacks, this research and other studies like it have changed the public conversation about women’s political leadership. The question is no longer whether women can lead a country like men, but whether they will be even better at it.

Big crises also give birth to great leaders, as in the case of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who dealt with the economic collapse in the 1930s. Roosevelt created the New Deal with the American people and referred to it with monumental language, the most famous of which was “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The COVID-19 health and economic crisis is historic; it is comparable to the Great Depression of 1929. It will have tremendous implications for the progress of many countries and for society. The ability of a president or prime minister to lead will be assessed in part by how they handle the pandemic. It is also possible that COVID-19 will signal a revolution in the status of women in politics.

It is possible that this is what will happen in the case of America. If they continue to do a good job dealing with the difficult situation that Trump has left behind, Biden and Harris will be lauded as heroes. The president-elect will probably be satisfied with one term because of his advanced age and his vice president will be the natural candidate for first female president in the United States; additional confirmation, perhaps, that the COVID-19 era has led to a different attitude toward female leaders.

Dr. Baruch Leshem is a political science and communications lecturer at the Hadassah Institute and the author of “Netanyahu: The School of Political Marketing.”