The mid-term results of American election are pointers to the shape of future things to come: Trump, to glee of his notorious temper, as a stormy petrel, has offended too many Americans – Democrats and Republicans, alike – by his ill-advised wars against Russia, Iran and aiding the genocide against innocent Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The war against Iran is unpopular: it has caused an astronomical increase in the price of gas (petrol) to nearly six dollars per gallon from pre-war price of three, to the discomfort of a majority of American auto owners and countless businesses – agriculture and mass transit, say – that are gas-allied. In the same breath, it has squeezed disposable cash out of most middle class households.
Americans were appalled that Trump funnelled scarce national resources to the Jewish State of Israel in committing genocide against innocent Palestinians in Gaza.
Those were some of the reasons that caused the cousin of a seismic shift in Congress and some states like Georgia Ohio, New Mexico and Texas, where women and minorities broke new grounds in, supposedly, Republican redoubts.
In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, born by enslaved parents, was elected the first African American governor of Georgia. Ohio, Amy Acton emerged victorious to be the state’s first woman governor. Texas, Gina Hinojosa would serve as the first Latina governor the of oil-abundant state. Something profoundly new happened in the State of New Mexico: Deb Haaland, a Native American, was elected as the first woman governor.
Still, across party lines, it’s widely held by seasoned psephologists that Bottoms was the best sprinter in the mid-term election. She had, as an aiding wind, her long stint in the politics of Georgia and a brief showing inside Biden’s White House.
Out of these impressive firsts achieved by women, it does seem to me that they would spring a more ambitious development, soon: two women – both African Americans from the Democratic Party – as the first successive women presidents of the United States of America after Trump’s exit.
It’s a development that might compare favourably to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both white, who were second and third vice-presidents and later presidents, in that order.
You never can tell, American voters of the two leading parties – the Republican party and Democratic Party – might, in protest against male dominance of the their political space nod, enthusiastically, any time hence, at both presidential and vice-presidential candidates being African American.
Let’s give our daughters of Eve or mothers a chance, may well be the vote sweeping slogan or appeal that would be endorsed by a crushing number of American tax-payers and voters.
In that case, would it be the Democratic Party or the Republican Party that would produce a Carmelita Jetta as the first woman tenant in Washington, D. C.?
Such a unique sprint would be a crowd puller.
The Democrats, who have suffered humiliating knock outs, in the hands of Republican misogynists, each time, since 1984, when they made history by featuring a woman vice-president, in the person of Geraldine Ferraro, behind former vice-president, Walter Mondale, would want their candidates to play a Carmelita Jetta – and, so breast the tape first.
They would want to put behind them the ugly – if embarrassing – experiences of Trump trouncing, at two presidential elections, two of their candidates: Hillary Clinton and Karmala Harris.
Whichever way you look at it, it promises to be a political development of exceptional brilliance; one that would pull American women from their cysts to storm the political space – now that the weather is openly in their favour.
One newspaper columnist said, in the early 1980s, that “the United States of America leads the world in everything!” And that includes the conquest of the Moon by Neil Alden Armstrong and eleven others between 1969 and 1972.
Put bluntly, those astronauts could be tagged the twelve disciples of the Moon, as opposed to the ones recorded in the Holy Bible!
One is profoundly persuaded – beyond every shadow of doubt – the encouraging, glistening results of the mid-term election has sown a seed out of which would spring twelve, chain women presidents of the United States of America. Henceforward. The United States of America leads the world in everything!
And whenever any one of the Keishas, Lances, and Bottoms conquer the White House, there might be a new American export to the rest of the free world: a new political culture that produces women presidents. One of the underlying intents would be to discourage embarrassing “inappropriate relationship” – a la lubricious Clinton and adventurous Lewinsky.
A second would be that, with nearly 90 per cent of the member states of the United Nations, governed by beautiful, married women, who have had issues, the propensity to go to war, any where, would be almost nil. Such beautiful women presidents would hold back the military of their countries from going to war.
Put differently, such beautiful women, like Bottoms, who have experienced the pangs of childbirth, would rather preach the gospel dialogue than resort to senseless and wasteful war in which the children of other mothers, like they, would be killed.
It would be Washington reinventing itself, as a global advocate of the political advancement of women.
Thereafter, Washington would cease to be known as the address for war, but peace and equity that encourages active participation of women in politics.
And it would seem certain, that, for the next century, the world would be devoid of senseless, sanguinary conflicts. Supreme shall global peace reign to the growth of political economies of many countries. And, so, a renewed global drive to help poverty in most countries of the South.
What that means is that warlike and wasteful Republicans would be cast into Siberia or tundra, which Providence has spared them in the mid-term elections, of American politics.
The obvious truth is that Americans of diverse political hues are beginning to question, for strong moral and economic reasons, white dominance of the White House, Capitol Hill, and Supreme Court since the past two hundred and fifty years. The states, too.
It’s high time that other races: African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, etc.; were given an ample chance to conquer the White House.
The late Sam Cooke – an African American and founder of soul music – crooned, in the 1960s, “Change Is Gonna Come.”
In fulfillment of that prophecy, Barack Obama came with the audacity of hope and stout confidence and said, “Yes, We Can.” And that was how he became the 44th tenant at the White House for a fairly peaceful eight years.
Mahalia Jackson – an African American once crooned: “We Shall Overcome Someday.” Women are gradually doing so.
Where the Karmalas and the Harrises, the Shirleys and the Chisholms, etc. have failed, one, strongly, believes that the current tide, in the politics of the United States of America, might be gracious enough to ease the likes of Keisha Lance Bottoms, “. . . some sweet day . . . ” to the White House.
Come that happy day, it might just be compelling to rename the official residence of the president of the United States of America – The American President’s Residence, say – such that it bears little of colour or race!
*Uzuakpundu is a Lagos-based journalist.
