The Glass Ceiling, Still Intact: Women and Power in Washington

Summary

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: The Glass Ceiling, Still Intact: Women and Power in Washington
Air Date: February 18, 2023
Host: Evan Osnos
Panelists: Susan Glasser & Jane Mayer

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Episode Overview

In this episode, the panel reflects on the enduring barriers for women in American politics, prompted by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s retirement announcement, Nikki Haley’s presidential bid, and ongoing discussions about Vice President Kamala Harris’s political standing. The conversation examines what has—and hasn’t—changed for women in positions of power in Washington since the “Year of the Woman” in 1992, exploring legacies, double standards, and the complex intersection of gender, age, and political opportunity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

A. Dianne Feinstein’s Legacy and Retirement

[04:06–12:34]

• Feinstein’s Trailblazing Career:
  • Recounted her rise after the assassination of Supervisor Harvey Milk and her historic senatorial win in 1992, when just two women sat in the U.S. Senate (Susan Glasser, [05:12]).
  • Accomplishments: Authored the 1994 assault weapons ban and led a landmark investigation into the CIA torture program, showing “backbone” and persistence (Jane Mayer, [07:37]).
• Changing Attitudes on Power and Age:
  • Feinstein’s late-career struggles became a “front page story,” illustrating reluctance to relinquish power among longtime politicians (Glasser, [10:24]).
  • Age and gender intersect: Questions over her abilities raised the issue of whether women are judged more harshly than older male colleagues (Jane Mayer, [11:42]).

“She was incredibly well-prepared… She got to the bottom of that [CIA] torture program—compiled a record that shows how far America came from its ideals.”
― Jane Mayer, [07:37]

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B. The Enduring “Glass Ceiling” & Numbers on Women in Power

[05:12, 32:35]

• Despite gains since 1992, progress is slow: Women are only about a quarter of Senators and Representatives; just 12 state governors are women; and only 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women (Glasser, [05:12]).
• There’s still only one female vice president in U.S. history.

“If I’d conjured my 1992 self…I would have thought we would have done a lot better.”
— Susan Glasser, [05:12]

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C. Gender, Age, and Double Standards in Politics

[12:57–19:35]

• Nikki Haley’s Candidacy:
  • Haley’s campaign hinges on generational change, but media figures diminish her for supposed “age”—a double standard for women (Glasser, [12:57]; Don Lemon quoted at [13:34]).
  • The suggestion that women are “in their prime” in their 20s-40s is critiqued (Katie Drummond, [13:34]); men are seen as just entering their prime in their 50s+ (Jane Mayer, [14:19]).
• Haley Struggles with Policy Identity:
  • Fumbles on abortion and Trump comparisons—“She…just couldn’t find a comfortable spot. She needed to be better prepared… and she’s not.” (Jane Mayer, [15:29]).
  • Wall Street Journal’s “withering” assessment—no clear rationale for her candidacy (Osnos, [16:01]; Glasser, [16:24]).

“A woman might be judged old in her 50s. And a man might be judged as just reaching the prime of his.”
— Jane Mayer, [14:19]

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D. The Hillary Clinton "Hangover"

[18:05–22:56]

• The 2016 loss was widely expected to break the “glass ceiling”—instead, it unleashed “visceral hatred” and PTSD-like reluctance among women to pursue higher office (Osnos, [18:05]; Glasser, [19:59]; Mayer, [21:13]).
• Clinton’s loss has lasting psychological and practical effects on political ambition for women.

“I am struck by the visceral hatred [Clinton] stirred. She was treated…as if she was Satan. There were literally pictures of her morphed with Satan... the poison that it unleashed, I think, was shocking.”
— Jane Mayer, [21:13]

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E. Kamala Harris’s Struggles and the Vice Presidency Trap

[23:48–30:16]

• Harris faces skepticism both within and outside the party about her capacity to be Biden’s successor, some of it gendered and racialized (Mayer, [24:38]; Glasser, [25:37]).
• Uniquely tough job—vice presidency often lacks power, and Harris was assigned “no-win” portfolios (Osnos, [28:22]).
• Many Democratic insiders and former staff doubt Harris’s readiness for the presidency, even as public attacks echo prior gender/race bias.

“[Harris] is the highest-ranking woman…[but] a growing inability to marshal a sense of inevitability around her… a double whammy being a person of color and being female.”
— Jane Mayer, [24:38]

• Biden is politically boxed in regarding the 2024 ticket due to the optics and significance of Harris’s historic status (Glasser, [25:37]).

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F. Why Progress Has Been So Slow

[30:16–34:25]

• Political parties seem to default to “safe” older white male candidates, despite broad public desire for something new (Glasser, [30:16]).
• The “year of the woman” momentum from 1992 has not brought parity—discussion persists on whether failures are individual or systemic (Osnos, [34:01]; Glasser & Mayer, [32:10–32:35]).

“If you’re not idealistic when you’re young…I was there in 1992…All those women on stage. It was a moment of promise…the idea of inevitability.”
— Susan Glasser, [32:35]

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Documentation and Accountability:
  “I’m just gonna quote our former colleague Sy Hirsch, who used to always say to me, kid, get the documents.”
  — Jane Mayer, [02:38]
• On Relinquishing Power:
  “Once in power, people just don’t willingly relinquish it.”
  — Susan Glasser, [10:24]
• On Vice Presidency:
  “Vice president is one of the worst jobs in Washington—bucket of warm spit and all of that.”
  — Susan Glasser, [25:37]
• On Predictability and Progress:
  “Politics is the strange unpredictability. Tell your 1992 self that Donald Trump was gonna be president…anything is possible.”
  — Susan Glasser, [34:11]

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Important Timestamps

• [03:12–04:06] – Dianne Feinstein's retirement and its context
• [05:12] – Susan Glasser on the stagnation of women’s advancement in power
• [07:37] – Jane Mayer discusses Feinstein’s achievements and setbacks
• [12:34–13:34] – Media double standards about age and gender (Nikki Haley, Don Lemon)
• [15:29–16:24] – Nikki Haley’s campaign launch stumbles
• [19:59–22:28] – Psychological aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s loss
• [24:38–25:37] – Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser on Kamala Harris’s predicament
• [28:22] – How the Biden-Harris dynamic mirrors and diverges from past White House relationships
• [32:10–32:35] – Panelists reflect on their own expectations from 1992
• [34:11] – Endnote on unpredictability of American politics

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Closing Thoughts

The episode concludes with a sober assessment: while women’s representation in politics has grown, the “glass ceiling” remains. A persistent set of cultural, institutional, and psychological factors still limit women’s ascent—exemplified in political discourse, party strategies, and public perception. The stories of Dianne Feinstein, Nikki Haley, Kamala Harris, and Hillary Clinton represent both progress and the many remaining barriers. Yet, as always, the unpredictability of American politics leaves open the possibility for change—however belated.

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Transcript

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[Susan Glaser]

Oh my God. Did you guys. I have to admit I stayed up last night reading the filing in the Fox News case. The emails and texts are so incredible. And hearing from Rupert Murdoch directly that.

[Evan Osnos]

Rupert Murdoch would be the V. By.

[Susan Glaser]

The way, I love his plan, which seems like an amazing and by the way good ratings plan that he wanted to have Tucker Carlson and Lori Graham and Sean Hannity together in primetime debunking Trump's big lie and saying there was no election fraud. How come they didn't do that?

[Jane Mayer]

Because they won't tell the truth to their base in case they lose the ratings.

[Susan Glaser]

That's cdn. Scott. You know where she is going off and saying like we can't talk down to our base. Oh my God. So the facts are talking down to our base.

[Evan Osnos]

I think it was probably the purest distillation of cynicism on the far right media that I've ever seen laid out. It turns out the text messages always tell the tale.

[Jane Mayer]

Thank God. But you know, so caught red handed though. I mean the idea that you've got Laura Ingraham saying Sidney Powell's a nut. And by the way, so is Giuliani. And, you know, and then they say, but.

[Susan Glaser]

And Sean wanting to fire a Fox reporter for tweeting the truth.

[Evan Osnos]

Yeah.

[Susan Glaser]

It is a reminder. You know, the news stories are good, but reading the actual brief is better.

[Jane Mayer]

I'm just gonna quote our former colleague Sy Hirsch, who used to always say to me, kid, get the documents.

[Evan Osnos]

Welcome to the Political Scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined by my colleagues Susan Glaser and Jane Mayer. Good morning.

[Susan Glaser]

Hey, Evan.

[Jane Mayer]

Hey, Evan.

[Dianne Feinstein]

It's with a great deal of pleasure that I introduce someone who will be the very first woman senator from California, Diane Feinstein.

[Archive Clip of Dianne Feinstein]

1992 isn't just the year of the woman, it's the year of the people. Because this year, people, men and women working together, are going to take back our government and take back the White House from George Bush. Our opponents deride this wave of change as gender politics, but they just still don't get it. It's not about gender. It's about an agenda, an agenda of change.

[Evan Osnos]

California Senator Dianne Feinstein announced her retirement this week. First elected in 1992, she became one of the most powerful senators in the country and was often spoken of as a possible presidential contender, although she never ran. Also this week, Nikki Haley announced her bid for the Republican presidential nomination. And in Democratic circles, there are new reports of hand wringing over Vice President Kamala Harris political prospects. All of this got us thinking about 1992, the year of the woman, as it was known, and what's changed and not changed for women in politics in the three decades since. So let's start with Feinstein's announcement. Susan, in your column today, you zeroed in on that moment, her decision to not write, run for reelection. And you took stock of her career, which really sort of began at the national level in a dramatic moment after an assassination in San Francisco, and then extended to these really significant moments in Congress, which some people today may not know as much about. How do you think about her legacy and how it will be assessed?

[Susan Glaser]

Well, this is an example, isn't it, Evan, of where you don't wanna be remembered by your exit? It was a long time coming. The exit. Jane did great reporting back in 2020 about this incredibly awk. Nobody wants to hustle Dianne Feinstein, someone with an incredible legacy, off the stage before she's ready. At the same time, she was such a significant figure. I remember coming to Washington As a young reporter on Capitol Hill, this was basically right before, right as Dianne Feinstein was running for Senate. This was a moment when you cannot even imagine in today's context, there were two women in the United States Senate. When Dianne Feinstein and a number of other women ran for the Senate in 1992, she was already the well known mayor of San Francisco. She had come into politics in a sort of dramatic fashion after the assassination of Supervisor Harvey Milk. But she had run and lost, interestingly, for California governor just two years previously. Then she and a number of other women, fueled by the anger of the Clarence Thomas hearings they run. Seven women are now members of the United States Senate in 1993. And you know, that. Wow, in the context of the time, that was a really big deal. That was okay, Terrible numbers still, but at least there's a positive trajectory. And I have to say, writing the column yesterday really just reminded me if I had conjured my 1992 self, right, to be honest, I would have thought we would have done a lot better. So all of this, three decades, 30 years later, women are one quarter of the Senate. Women are one quarter, more or less of the House of Representatives. There's 12 women governors. Women just this year hit a new record high 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs. 10%. And oh, great, we have one in history, female vice president. So we're closer than ever before to the White House. But I have to say, I don't feel like this is a terrific record.

[Evan Osnos]

We're gonna look into that in detail over the course of this show. And I'm curious, as you think, Jane, about Feinstein's place in that 30 year arc. She was involved in a number of significant moments, both legislative achievements and then also setbacks for the party in some ways. How do you think about what she leaves behind?

[Jane Mayer]

I mean, I think in some ways she was, you know, the iconic female senator. She was stately, she was formidable. She was incredibly well prepared, always for everything. She was a very, very tough boss. She's a famously tough boss on her staff. Very demanding. And she had some very major achievements that people really need to, I think, give her credit for. In 1994, she got through an assault weapons ban. It wasn't as strong as she hoped it would be. She was disappointed she couldn't get more through. But it was a important piece of legislation in this country and she did it in such a dramatic fashion. At some point, I think one of the senators from the heartland said, you know, madam, I think you need to know a little bit more about firearms. And she said, well, sir, let me just tell you a little bit about firearms. I learned about it when I put my finger through the bullet hole of my colleague on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. I think I know a fair amount about firearms as he died, you know, so she was always associated with trying to have some kind of sensible gun control in this country. It's been a disappointing record. Obviously, you know, especially you think about it today, right in the wake of yet another mass murder at Michigan State. Something that I personally think she did a magnificent job with was her investigation of the CIA torture program. And she was a tiger who fought off the CIA and she would not give up. She's very persistent. She got to the bott of that torture program. It took years, but they compiled a record that for history shows exactly how far America came from its ideals when it had a state ordered torture program. And it took her backbone to make that happen and make as much of it public as she did. And in terms of the disappointments, I mean, I think in recent years, she has begun to be seen as someone who was faltering. She was on the Judiciary Committee. She was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and there had been no women on that committee before. But in the Kavanaugh hearings and in the hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, there was a lot of feeling in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that she was too soft, that she didn't handle it well, and that she was embarrassing. And I think she was beginning to lose her faculties.

[Evan Osnos]

It seems like that was the moment when this conversation in Washington, which had been happening in sort of hushed terms, and Jane, you'd written about that, begun to sort of surface the fact that some of even her supporters thought it was time for her to go. Susan, was that when this became, in a sense, a front page story?

[Susan Glaser]

Yeah, that's right. And in fact, we actually had the kind of remarkable, very unusual for Washington spectacle of a number of prominent Democrats actually already announcing their bids for the Senate to succeed Feinstein before she herself was willing to issue this statement. Adam Schiff, who is, you know, a household name after leading Trump's first impeachment, already announced that he was running. Katie Porter, very sort of well known and beloved in the progressive wing of the party. She's already announced she's running, I think Barbara Lee, the Assembly woman and congresswoman, longtime figure. She's already filed her papers. And so you have a huge potential primary there that's already unfolded and actually very poignant spectacle when Feinstein was asked in the Capitol by reporters on the day that her announcement came out. And she said, no, I haven't said anything. And her aide was caught telling the reporters, actually, we've already put that out. And so again, it reinforces this rule one, if you will, of the political scene. Right. Which is that once in power, people just don't willingly relinquish it.

[Evan Osnos]

It does seem as if one of the questions that surrounded the conversation around Feinstein's age was related to gender.

[Jane Mayer]

This is true. They don't ask questions about Mitch McConnell, who is also quite old. Quite a bit.

[Evan Osnos]

Also 80 years old.

[Jane Mayer]

Yeah. I mean. And the same age as Biden, right? Exact. Chuck Grassley. There are other really ancient figures in the Senate who were male. But I have to push back a little bit. Having done the reporting on Feinstein. It's not just about age. People age differently. And the problem with Feinstein, I hate to say it, was she was really losing her ability to do the job. And people around her knew it. Her colleagues saw it on the committee. She was repeating herself in hearings, reading the same lines over and over without realizing. She just had. She'd forgotten what her aides told her just a few minutes earlier. It was painful, it was terrible. She was just not able to do the job.

[Evan Osnos]

Yeah. And I think that is something that we try to keep in mind as we talk about age going forward. This is gonna be a topic that's gonna be in our conversations for the next two years. How much is it about performance and how much is it about the number? I mean, President Biden just had his annual physical that came out yesterday. And everybody's of course looking at that to see what do we learn. But in the end, it comes down to whether somebody can do the job, not whether or not they are hitting a certain number.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, it also is about different built in expectations. And that's where you have a sort of a painful moment because every politician is going to be exploiting this subject in the 2024 presidential election. And I was really struck by, kind of shocked by the comments by my former colleague on cnn, Don Lemon, who greeted the announcement of Nikki Haley, a very vigorous 51 year old former two time governor of South Carolina, and said, well, she's old.

[Katie Drummond]

I think it's the wrong road to go down. She says people, politicians are something, are not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn't in her prime. Sorry. When a woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s, what are you talking. That's not, according to me, prime for what? It depends. It's just like prime. If you look it up. If you Google when is a woman in her prime? It'll say twenties, thirties, and forties.

[Susan Glaser]

Haley, of course, is running her campaign as a, quote, new generation woman and trying to attack both Joe Biden by name, Donald Trump, not by name. And in fact, the signature proposal that she made in her campaign announcement was that to require mandatory mental competence tests for candidates over the age of 75.

[Jane Mayer]

Gee, I wonder why she picked 75. But it does seem like. Okay, let's go back to the idea of whether there's a different standard for the genders. A woman might be judged old in her 50s. Right. And a man might be judged as just reaching the prime of his.

[Susan Glaser]

Absolutely. That's the point. It's shocking.

[Evan Osnos]

Which gets us to the question of Nikki Haley's candidacy. I mean, I think that this is a moment that in some ways forces the GOP to talk about the kinds of things it doesn't want to talk about, like diversity, like gender. What do you think, Jane, of her prospects?

[Jane Mayer]

I've been extremely unimpressed with her first few statements. She was asked by Sean Hannity and Fox whether she. What exactly were her differences on policy from Trump.

[Evan Osnos]

What specific policy areas would you. Would you say part with Donald Trump?

[Archive Clip of Dianne Feinstein]

What I am saying is I don't kick sideways. I'm kicking forward. Joe Biden is the president. He's the one I'm running against. And what I'm saying is you don't have to be 80 years old to be president.

[Jane Mayer]

She was just unable to answer the question you would think someone would be ready in time for when they're announcing for the presidency. It's such an obvious question, and she didn't have an answer. The same with when she was asked about her position on a national ban on abort. She stammered. She went left, she went right, she went through the middle. She just couldn't find a comfortable spot. She needed to be better prepared in her first few minutes, and she's not. So I can't say that I'm blown away by her first few moments.

[Evan Osnos]

I was struck by the fact, Susan, that right out of the gate, she got a fairly withering assessment from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which said that there is, quote, no clear rationale for her candidacy. I mean, she's sort of running as the candidate of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. And this, in theory, you would expect. And they're more or less saying that this is a dead letter. What do you make of it?

[Susan Glaser]

Yeah, the sort of. The early line from the Washington wags perspective is she's running for vice president. But I think Jean has gotten in a way to the essence of the problem for Nikki Haley, which is to say maybe she would have been a good candidate for what we thought the Republican party was in 2015. But. But the long shadow of Trump and Trumpism hangs over her, and she hasn't figured out how to wear it. But I think that Haley really perfectly encapsulates the story of this party taken over by Donald Trump and becomes his uncomfortable enablers. There's no one who more sums that up than Nikki Haley. She is someone who reviled Donald Trump, publicly, said he was absolutely unsuited to office, whose policy positions, whose life story were rebuked to Donald Trump, and yet she served in Donald Trump's Cabinet, never repudiated him, except in the sort of 24 to 48 hours after January 6th when she thought that's what was gonna happen with the party. This moment where Nikki Haley, for once in her life, gets a little bit too far ahead of the crowd and misjudges. So anyways, we're talking about gender, though. And Evan, on the positive side, no one is looking at Nikki Haley and saying, well, she has zero chance of being president because she's a woman. They're saying she has zero chance of being president for other reasons. But it used to be when we were sort of coming up in politics that actually people thought, well, the first woman president maybe will be a conservative. Let's look at the sort of Maggie Thatcher example. What do you make of that? I mean, or have you just post Hillary Clinton given up altogether?

[Evan Osnos]

You know, what's striking is to go back to, if we remember where we were as a culture in the week before the 2016 election, there was this kind of, you know, overwhelming assumption that she was going to win and that we as a country had kind of crested the hill finally. Not obviously saying that we were done with these issues, but that finally that particular glass ceiling was going to be broken. And of course it wasn't. And it feels very much as if we've then moved back a whole series of steps since there. If you look at the Dobbs decision. And then this gets to the question of the Republican Party, which has been getting deeper and deeper into these kind of old fashioned antediluvian notions of gender roles. I mean, what are we supposed to be? And this is all, in some ways a response to their perception of a culture war as their defining fulcrum of success politically. It's crazy to think that today that Nikki Haley, in her announcement was using the kind of language. I mean, this drew just an incredible number of eye rolls when she said that she knows how to kick back against a bully. And as she said, it hurts more in heels. I mean, this was like something that. I don't know, it was.

[Susan Glaser]

It's a cliche, but I have to say I'd love to see her actually do it.

[Jane Mayer]

Well, it's such a canned line, though. It just feels like, oh, God, you kind of. What a groaner.

[Evan Osnos]

I guess they've been chatgpt generated it based on Sarah Palin.

[Susan Glaser]

The entire speech had a sort of mad libs feel like, you know, it was like something out of Veep.

[Jane Mayer]

Well, I mean, I do think that assessing the impact of Hillary's loss hangs over this whole subject. Absolutely. And there was so much kind of excitement, and there was also such a feeling, I think, among many people that it was a fait accompli and that she was going to win. And so I think there's now a sort of a PTSD feeling about the whole subject.

[Susan Glaser]

Yeah, the Hillary hangover is really something I think that is influencing. First of all, I think it's really striking here in Washington when you talk with people. You know, there are a lot of fantastic women office holders now, senators, cabinet members. And I have spoken with people who would be fantastic in senior leadership positions, and they say, you know what? A woman is not going to win. A woman is not going to get this job. I'd be crazy to pursue this. Things like that. And I will never forget what I was doing on the Monday night before the Tuesday election in 2016, which is that I was invited to a dinner by a senior ambassador in Washington that was a dinner ostensibly in honor of Christine Lagarde, the then woman who was in charge of the International Monetary Fund. It was all women except for the ambassador. And he went around the table and he said, well, let's talk about what this historic breakthrough this week of having a woman president of the United States means to each of us. And it was this very emotional and, of course, in hindsight, absolutely terrifying evening.

[Jane Mayer]

It was crazy and embarrassing to people afterwards. I think. I know. I think of. I mean, there's one image that goes through my mind every time I think of Hillary Clinton losing, which was that one of the operatives who was working in the campaign went up to New York for the big victory celebration, and he brought his six year old daughter and she was dressed in a little pantsuit. So it could be just like Hillary. And the idea of what a crushing thing for this family and for the six year old anyway. But also when I look back on it, I am struck by the visceral hatred that she stirred. There are plenty of reasons that you could say maybe she wasn't the candidate that some people liked and didn't have policies and positions that many people supported in the Republican Party, obviously, but that's not how she was treated. She was treated by many people online as if she was Satan. I mean, and there were literally pictures of her sort of morphed with Satan and she was accused of being a murderer with the poison that it unleashed, I think was shocking and makes you realize again that there's a tremendous reactionary.

[Susan Glaser]

And people will say again and again, oh, but it's not that I'm sexist, it's not that I was against voting for a woman. She's got a bad boy, she just don't like Hillary. And you know, of course we hear that again and again. It's one of the tropes of why women aren't considered to be leaders. And I just, I think that Trump has put all of those facets of our society, you know, sort of into overdrive.

[Evan Osnos]

The political scene will be back in just a moment.

[Katie Drummond]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global Editorial director.

[Evan Osnos]

I'm Michael Coloury, Wired's Director of Consumer, Tech and Culture.

[Susan Glaser]

And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.

[Katie Drummond]

And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.

[Susan Glaser]

Right.

[Evan Osnos]

So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.

[Susan Glaser]

Affecting Washington and how they affect you.

[Katie Drummond]

Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.

[Susan Glaser]

We gotta talk about the Kamala Harris situation.

[Evan Osnos]

I think there are some people who say, you know, after 2016, that Democrats have been gun shy about the idea of doing it again and we don't have trust anymore that we can accurately we, as an institution of political writers and thinkers, that we actually gauge the public mood very well. Kamala Harris occupies a really distinct place right now in the politics because she is obviously, she's the highest ranking woman who the Democrats have in office right now. And yet she's had this persistent and now growing inability to marshal a sense of inevitability around her, the idea that she is the heir apparent. Why do you think that it's been so difficult for her, James, in Washington?

[Jane Mayer]

People will say who have spent time with her that she just doesn't have the background and the experience and that she's not entirely up to the job. I'm not sure I buy it. I know almost everybody I talk to does. I had an off the record dinner with her. I thought she was very impressive. She refers to herself a lot as a prosecutor, her role as a prosecutor in the past. But, you know, I watch a lot of the commentary online, and I see her being attacked very much the way Hillary Clinton was from day one. There has been a kind of a viciousness to the right wing's attack on her. And I think, you know, it's a double whammy being a person of color and being female. And she's been slaughtered online. Everywhere she goes. The media kind of coverage suggests she's inadequate. You know, I just didn't see that when I had dinner with her.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, look, vice president is one of the worst jobs in Washington. We can all say that. You know, bucket of warm spit and all of that. And so it's very hard to make your mark. And Harris came to the post with very little previous grounding in Washington or, you know, perhaps a sense of how to navigate a role like that. She had just been in the Senate for a few years when she got the nod. Let's remember, though, that we're really talking about a couple of different issues. One is the politics of it. And regardless of how this came about, the politics of it look pretty bad for Kamala Harris. Voters are not convinced that she has what it takes to succeed Joe Biden, and yet she has the backing of an important constituency. So that puts Biden in a tough spot because he certainly isn't going to jettison the first black woman, Asian woman, woman, woman from the vice presidency. Right. There's no contemplation at all of Biden, you know, going with someone else on the vice presidential ticket for that reason. At the same time, she has failed to consolidate and to convince Democratic party leaders and rank and file people, according to polls, that she could be Biden's heir. And is that if Biden did not run again, you'd be looking at a potentially very divisive and damaging open primary in which Harris would be one of many candidates in a way that might be bad for the party looking ahead to the 2024 general election. Then there's the question of the job she's actually done as vice president and how this view of her has come about in the reporting. And I will say that I have spoken with people who work directly with Kamala Harris, who admire her, who thinks she is certainly a smart person, and who do not believe she is suited to be the President of the United States, which is an alarming thing when she has actuarially, perhaps a better chance than any recent vice president of actually becoming president. And that is really striking. I had a very open mind about Harris. Didn't have an impression one way or the other. The recent big reported pieces in both the New York Times and the Washington Post spoke with dozens of people who work directly with Harris. These accounts are coming from people who have worked with Harris. It certainly is. You know, that we have different expectations for women leaders than we do for male leaders. We've all seen that in a firsthand way. But these aren't Republicans who are spewing online hate. These are people who worked with and for and alongside Harris on the same team. Is that what you've seen, Evan?

[Evan Osnos]

I think there is something in the relationship between Harris and the White House, which is that when it started, this was like a lot of president and vice president relationships. It was kind of a shotgun marriage. But that does not mean by any means that it's doomed to fail. I mean, Obama and Biden had very little knowledge of each other and didn't have any sort of built in trust. What Biden did at the outset was more or less give her the same jobs that he had when he was vice president. He said, you're gonna handle things like immigration issues at the border. You're gonna handle some relations with Congress. But obviously the conditions were completely different than when he was vice president. The immigration issue was much harder, much more polarizing. It become a sort of central defining issue of politics. And obviously on Congress, he was gonna do that. And she was never really a creature of Congress anyway. So there is a degree to which the agenda that was put in front of her was challenging. And then you have to add one other piece of it, which is that she got. She got beat up a lot early on for not going to the border. You remember, there was this issue about, have you even been to the border? Part of the reason she hadn't come up with a good answer to that question or literally hadn't even been there was partly because she couldn't leave Washington D.C. i mean, she was the deciding vote in the Senate for all of these essential moments, which meant just as a practical matter, she had to be more or less within range all the time. None of these are individually the pieces that explain why she is where she is now. But you have to include all of this when you think about it. And the net effect is that over time, like anything in Washington, you develop a rap kind of. What's the take on that person? There was some reporting recently that Biden had described her as a work in progress. And I think that the Democrats find themselves in this curious position, as you've both described, where nobody is gonna get in line in front of Kamala Harris, but nobody is yet saying that they think that she's the one who's ready to take over.

[Susan Glaser]

I just, I'm really struck that we're looking at a situation where, you know, polls overwhelmingly Democrats and Republicans, the one thing they agree on right now is they don't want a rematch of 2020 and 2024. And yet here we are hurtling towards a situation where these sort of two geriatric white men look quite possibly to be their party's nominees. Democrats, it seems to me, are sort of walking into a situation once again, as they did in 2020, of saying we have to default to the safe setting. And in American politics for a of reasons, the safe setting that voters are defaulting to in the Democratic Party is.

[Jane Mayer]

A white man, the one wild card. And we've all seen that there've been all kinds of coverage, for instance of Nikki Haley saying she will never be president, whatever is that sometimes unexpected things happen.

[Evan Osnos]

You're absolutely right. I'm glad you mentioned that, Jay.

[Jane Mayer]

I just have to say someone rises to take the helm, you know, and so we all can say this is a somewhat fragile looking situation with these ancient candidates running a rerun. Something could happen.

[Evan Osnos]

It's 600 days until the election at least. So God help us all.

[Susan Glaser]

Right, the countdown clock. It's too soon.

[Evan Osnos]

In some ways this all brings us back to 1992, which was the beginning of our story today. And in some ways so much the the beginning of this narrative about women in politics, that kind of ill chosen label, the year of the woman. I remember Barbara Mikulski, by the way. She used to mock that. She said it's not like the year of the caribou. This is something that is going to be with us and should be with us forever. If you were Susan and Jane now talking to yourselves back then in 1992, about the world we were going to inhabit. What do you say? What do you think about looking back on it, honestly?

[Jane Mayer]

I mean, in 92, I was writing a book about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill soon after those hearings, and it took three years to do it. And I would have expected more, I have to say. Instead, here we are 30 years later. Clarence Thomas is the dominant figure on the United States Supreme Court. And the numbers are slightly better for women, but they still haven't taken the White House.

[Susan Glaser]

You know, if you're not idealistic when you're young, I was there in 1992 at the convention in New York City. All those women went on the stage. It was a moment of promise. It was the idea that inevitability. You know, this was just going to happen.

[Dianne Feinstein]

Well, for years now, we've been saying a woman's place is in the House and in the Senate. And this looks like a good year for us to prove that statement to be accurate. The whole face of government is changing, and you see it standing on this stage of the Democratic National Convention.

[Susan Glaser]

And here we are. And it's not just that there's not a woman sitting in the White House. Just overall, I think the persistence, the persistence of these stories, this conversation that we're having today about women leadership and is it sexist or is it just the individual? This is a conversation that was already drearily familiar in 1992. And I just, you know, I had there's this great saying from former Soviet official, you know, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Viktor Chernobyrdin, and he says in Russian, basically, like, well, you know, we wanted things to be better, but it turned out as always. It turned out as always.

[Evan Osnos]

And yet at the same time, as Jane mentioned, and I think we all agree with this, one of the reasons that we are all interested in politics is the strange unpredictability.

[Susan Glaser]

That's right. It never happens exactly like it's predicted to. And look, tell your 9092 self any of us that Donald Trump was gonna be the president. And so, truly, in America, anything is possible.

[Jane Mayer]

I don't know if it's progress, but stay tun.

[Dianne Feinstein]

It is my pleasure now to introduce to you the Democratic women candidates for the United States House of Representatives. Elaine Baxter, Natalie M. Bruner.

[Evan Osnos]

All right, I think that's all from this week. Thank you, Jane, and thank you, Susan.

[Susan Glaser]

Great to be with you.

[Jane Mayer]

Evan, great to see you.

[Evan Osnos]

This has been the Political Scene. I'm Evan Osnos. We had production assistance today from Alex d'. Elia and Eli Cohen. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next week.

[Dianne Feinstein]

And Maxine Matter.

[Evan Osnos]

Right now we are.

[David Remnick]

Living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlemagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Susan Glaser]

From PRX.