Wednesday, June 08, 2016                                               11:07 AM

Hillary Clinton gave a speech last night—Oh, I enjoyed that—the joy on her face, the almost hysterical cheering of the crowd. It wasn’t just the end of the primary—it was the end of a long trip she’s taken—and an even longer trip that all the women in America have been on since Seneca Falls, 1848. It brought tears to my eyes—I said to Claire, “That old lady is making me cry!”

Stephen Colbert joked, later last night, that she was the first American woman to be a major party candidate—but then he put up a graphic of a whole bunch of women heads-of-state in other countries. I get the joke—but there’s a question to that joke, too: Why is America going to be the last—and by a lot of years—to elect a woman to lead? There is an undeniable, rock-hard misogyny to America—especially when it comes to leadership.

And to be fair, a woman leader might have kept us from wiping out the indigenous people in our pioneer days. A woman leader might have kept us from using slavery as our young nation’s economic leg-up. Who knows what kind of losers we would be if we’d let a woman’s sensitivity keep us from carving our destiny out of the flesh of anyone who stood in our way? God forbid, right?

But seriously, I’ve encountered some venomous, burnt-earth rejection of Hillary Clinton in social media. The number, and the extremity of the attacks on her could only have been engendered by a woman. No male candidate has ever inspired such passion. Many of them pooh-pooh the idea of electing a female president on the basis of Hillary’s supposed perfidy—but I suspect it works the other way—no one would be so ardently opposed to Hillary if she wasn’t a woman. Look at her opponent—the worst excuse for a man I have ever seen. And we debate whether he really means his racism. What the hell?

Three cheers for President Clinton-to-be. And how nice for my grand-daughter-to-be—she’s due in July, and by her fourth birthday, she’ll be watching a woman run for reelection to the Presidency of the United States. That’ll be good for her.

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