And the Race Goes On

Today, former Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani and Democratic candidate John Edwards dropped out of the race for president, leaving only four candidates with any reasonable chance of winning the election in November: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul, I do apologize for omitting you from my elite list, but let’s face it: your poll results have been looking rather bleak.

Not to disparage any candidates, but for the sake of expediency, let’s pretend for a moment that the primaries are over. Hillary Clinton and John McCain are the victors in their respective primaries. On the left side, we have a female, on the right, a male.

In a manner eerily similar to the presidential election in France last spring, we have a female who, for the first time United States history, is leading her party in a close race for the presidency. In France, Ségolène Royal, a Socialist, ran in the presidential election last year, opposite of Nicolas Sarkozy, a member of the Gaullist-conservative UMP party. Sarkozy was the ultimate winner, but only marginally; in the second and final round of the election, he won 53% of the votes, she, 46%.

Final results aside, Royal’s political presence in France spurred controversy comparable to the current goings-on in the United States. French critics grumbled over newspapers who referred to Royal by her first name, Ségolène—a similar predicament faced by Clinton in American newspapers.

Throughout recent decades, these two politically powerful females from two globally powerful democratic nations have made headlines. Never before in either France or the United States has a woman reached such a political summit as Clinton or Royal.

Whatever the results of the 2008 February primaries may be, the legacy left by powerful female political candidates is undeniably intriguing. Who knows what sort of implications this may have for the future of women in politics everywhere?