No woman has ever been America’s defense secretary. No woman has been chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And no woman has ever served as commander in chief, the president.
This is the bullseye. It has to be hit to crack the fabled Glass Ceiling, which has kept any woman from winning the presidency.
Do you trust a woman to fight and win for America?
In next week’s presidential debate, voters will see a sharp contrast in the candidates competing to be the next commander in chief. On one side will be a heavyset 78-year-old man who ducked military service during the Vietnam War and has a history of disparaging prisoners of war. He even puts down soldiers who died in war.
Standing on the other side will be a woman.
She is much younger at 59-years-old, physically fit and also with no military service. But she is also being embraced by several hawkish leaders with military experience.
“To defend our country against tyrants and terrorists, we need Kamala Harris behind the Resolute Desk,” former Defense Secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta said in his speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month.
“She understands what our military is for. The role of our military is to defend us from foreign enemies, It is not to threaten Americans, and it sure as hell isn’t to put immigrants in camps.”
Perhaps the most compelling endorsement of Harris as the next commander in chief comes from a military man who served in the Trump administration.
“After over a year in this job, I cannot understand [Russian President] Putin’s hold on Trump,” former Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said in a recent interview about his new book. “Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery,” McMaster wrote in his book.
This tracks with what Harris had to say about Trump as a military leader at the Democrats’ convention in Chicago.
“I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-Un, who are rooting for Trump,” said Harris. “Because they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors,” the vice president said. “They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable — because he wants to be an autocrat.”
That critique of Trump’s time as a military commander is bolstered by his many denigrating comments about people in uniform.
He recently said the civilian Congressional Medal of Freedom was better than the military’s Medal of Honor. The military people who earn the honor, he said, are “in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead.”
That was not a moment of errant speech. Trump famously mocked the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who won the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, as not a “war hero,” because Trump said he thought better of “people that weren’t captured.” McCain had been held as a prisoner of war and tortured for five years in Vietnam.
Trump also famously told a popular radio talk show host, Howard Stern, that he viewed avoiding service in the military much like avoiding sexually transmitted diseases. Recall he dodged the draft with dubious claims of bone spurs.
And last week, Trump created another uproar when he went to Arlington National Cemetery. Families of Americans who died during the evacuation of Afghanistan had invited him but efforts by Trump’s campaign to take photographs for potential use in political advertising led to a confrontation with cemetery officials.
Trump has directly sought to disparage Harris’s capacity to lead. “I don’t think she’s a very smart person,” he said. And he claims that leaders of other nations would treat Harris, a woman president, as a “play toy.”
He also reposted a picture of Harris and Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the 2016 presidential race, along with the crude comment that “blowjobs impacted both their careers.”
While Trump hammers his opponent for being a woman, Harris has worked to show she can lead the military. She has strengthened her case to be the commander in chief by naming as her vice president a man with 24 years of military service in the National Guard, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota.
Also, at the Chicago convention, Democrats in Congress who served in the military appeared in a mass on stage to wave to the crowd and the television audience.
In addition, a Republican veteran was given a speaking slot. “As a Republican speaking before you, I’m putting our country first,” said former Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who served in the Army. “Because the fact is, I do belong here. I know Kamala Harris shares my allegiance to the rule of law, the Constitution, and democracy, and she is dedicated to upholding all three in service to our country. Whatever policies we disagree on pale in comparison with those fundamental matters of principle, of decency, and of fidelity to this nation.”
Feminist scholar Camille Paglia once said, “If you’re going to be a woman president, she must communicate strength, reserve, and yet compassion.” So far, Vice President Harris scores sky-high on all three of those criteria.
And she is getting validation from defense hawks, both Republicans and Democrats, as she heads into next week’s debate with Donald Trump.
Locked and loaded — the bullseye is in sight.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.