The New Republic – Women of Substance – “…Now there are six—count them, six. Klobuchar, Warren, New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, and California’s Kamala Harris have a plausible shot, followed by Hawaii’s Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, whose qualifications and motivation remain unclear, and spiritual author Marianne Williamson, who, in her apparent quest to transmute news-cycle mentions into book sales, is channeling not so much her nineteenth-century spiritualist predecessor Woodhull as the great self-help goddess Oprah.
 To be sure, the United States is not Iceland, where women were put in charge after male recklessness and corruption led to the 2008 banking crisis. Nor are we France, where quotas require that parties must run an equal number of women candidates as men. And our political system certainly does not resemble the parliamentary democracies of Scandinavia and Northern Europe, where women were able to take office in significant numbers soon after the feminist revolution of the 1970s, sliding onto tickets alongside men at a time when aspiring American female political leaders could barely get the parties to notice them. We are not even Rwanda, where, after the genocide, a quota system ensured that 30 percent of government positions were filled by women, who brought with them basic policy innovations like seat-belt regulation—and, oh yes, peace.

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