Margaret Carlson, Columnist

Clinton Lost, But Women Still Won

Her candidacy ingrained the idea of a female president.

November 14, 2016 at 5:04 PM UTC

Margaret Carlson was a White House correspondent for Time, a weekly panelist on CNN’s “Capital Gang” and an editor at the New Republic.

It's a family affair.
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

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There will be the temptation to see Hillary Clinton’s defeat as evidence that a woman can’t rise to the top. If we’re not careful, the dominant gender will whisper in the backroom, let’s not nominate one of them again.

But it will happen, nonetheless -- and thanks to Clinton. Just seeing her win her party’s nomination and triumph in three debates has ingrained the idea that a female president is inevitable. Multiple female candidates will stand upon Clinton’s shoulders as she stood on others’. In her memoir “Hard Choices,” she wrote that the venerable Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s challenge to Barry Goldwater for her party’s nomination in 1964 inspired her to run for class president. They both lost and they both soldiered on.