As fate would have it, Stanford Erickson’s latest book couldn’t have hit the market at a better time.
Hillary Clinton is the current frontrunner for the Democrat Party’s nomination for the presidency. Carly Fiorina, though more likely to join the nominee on the Republican ticket than head it, is still clinging to fading hopes across the political aisle.
And if anything happens to Clinton – the FBI is investigating whether the former first lady, U.S. senator from New York and secretary of state put national security at risk by using a private email server to handle classified information – Elizabeth Warren is waiting in the wings.
Elizabeth Warren?
“I really like her,” the Vero Beach-based author said of the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. “She’s a very capable, very honorable woman and she’d be very competitive.
“She leans to the progressive side and she might have some trouble on national security, but she’s a potentially strong candidate,” he added. “She can beat anybody. If she ran, I think she would win.”
With Warren not running, however, Erickson called Clinton an “accomplished and astute woman” that he fully expects to be elected our 45th president.
“If she’s not indicted,” he said, “she’ll be a very formidable candidate, especially in the general election.”
Erickson’s reasons for favoring Clinton in the 2016 race are detailed in his new book, “The Kind of Women Who Can Be President of the United States,” in which he relied on his vast and varied experience as a news reporter, newspaper editor and Washington bureau chief to describe the qualities he believes are necessary for a woman to be elected to – and be successful in – the highest office in the land.
He said the U.S., which elected its first black president in 2008 and re-elected him in 2012, finally is ready to send a woman to the White House. And even if neither Clinton nor Fiorina get there this year, he believes it will happen soon … and often.
“For the next century, I predict as many women as men will be elected president,” Erickson said. “Women aren’t just a majority of the U.S. population; they’re also a majority of the people who vote for the president. So it’s highly probable we’ll see women elected.
“The key now is to figure out what kind of women are more likely to be elected – women who possess the qualities to run successfully and are best-suited for the job.”
That’s what Erickson strives to do in this book, which is, in many ways, a fitting sequel to “Mama’s Boy Presidents: Why Do We Keep Electing Them?” His previous book was published prior to the 2012 election, correctly predicted Barack Obama would win, and singled out Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush as the only “Daddy’s Boys” to occupy the Oval Office since John F. Kennedy.
The rest were “Mama’s Boys,” which, according to Erickson, means they had a greater attachment to – and were more influenced by – their mothers than their fathers. Kennedy, by the way, was a “Daddy’s Boy” and Obama is a “Mama’s Boy,” he said.
“I described 11 men who have held the U.S. presidency and, based on the success and failure of their presidency, I suggested the kind of man I thought needed to be elected in the future,” Erickson said of the “Mama’s Boys” book, which included chapters on George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
Just so you know: Erickson said his use of terms such as “Mama’s Boy” was not intended to have any negative connotation; it was merely a shorthand way to categorize the presidents using “attachment psychology” and explain the impact of their parental connections on their personalities.
It was no surprise, then, that he brought that same method of analysis and terminology to “The Kind of Women Who Can Be President of the United States,” which offers a similar discussion of the qualities necessary to get elected and function successfully as president, and identifies women who possess them.
“The book looks at eight women who have demonstrated political leadership in the 20th century and attempts to describe the type of women who should be elected president today and in the future,” Erickson said. “What is the common denominator among them?”
Not nationality. Not all eight are Americans. Nor are all of them still living. Some never held public office.
In addition to Clinton, Fiorina and Warren, Erickson selected former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, former First Ladies Edith Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt, and reigning German Chancellor Angela Merkel for his book.
In the first chapter, Erickson wrote that he chose those women because they possessed the personality and “abilities that permitted them to gain political prominence and influence,” and he believed studying them “might give insight to kind of woman” who can be elected president.
“I thought we could learn from them,” he said. Certainly, Erickson did.
Erickson, 76, who bought a home in Vero Beach seven years ago and has been a full-time resident here for the past 5 1/2 years, said he spent a year doing research before writing his first word.
“I did my homework,” said Erickson, a University of California-Berkeley graduate who worked as a reporter for Stars & Stripes and the San Francisco Examiner, served as Washington bureau chief for McGraw-Hill publications and was editor-in-chief of Knight-Ridder’s Journal of Commerce.
“I was a journalist for 35 years and, during that time, I covered the White House and the corporate world, interviewing a lot of top people in both politics and business – presidents of countries and companies,” he continued. “I relied on that experience and knowledge, just as I did for the other book, and also referred to articles, studies and books, including those written by experts.
“I didn’t just make it up,” he added. “It’s all foot-noted.”
Among the themes he discovered was that being a woman in politics hasn’t been easy.
“At the most basic, gut level, all these women had to make sacrifices in their marriages to be successful political leaders,” Erickson said, explaining that, of the eight women he wrote about, three were divorced from their first husbands (Merkel, Fiorina and Warren), one’s husband died early in their marriage (Wilson) and three stayed in very troubled marriages (Roosevelt, Meir and Clinton).
“Of the women in the book,” he added, “only Margaret Thatcher enjoyed a marriage in which she and her husband were mutually supportive of each other.”
He said Merkel, Fiorina and Warren all remarried, and their second husbands are supportive of their careers.
While each of the eight women provided compelling subjects, Erickson said one, in particular, was difficult to categorize – the one who will go a long way in selling the book.
“For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out Hillary,” he said. “I’d always assumed she was a Daddy’s Girl, but the more I looked at the puzzle, the more it didn’t fit. Then, I woke up one day and it hit me.
“She was a Mama’s Girl pretending to be a Daddy’s Girl, because that’s what she thought she needed to be to run for president,” he added. “She knows Americans tend to promote and elect strong women; women who are attached to the fathers. But she’s really a Mama’s Girl who, in many ways, has many of her mother’s qualities.
“That’s why she can sound so phony at times.”
Erickson said he has never interviewed Clinton, but he recalled meeting her and her husband, Bill, at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“I instinctively liked Bill, who was a charming guy, but I didn’t like Hillary,” he said. “To a person, everyone at our table said the same thing – and most of them were Democrats. There was just something inauthentic about her.
“Now I know why. Erickson wrote that Clinton, politically, is her own worst enemy because “her electability is impaired by her inability at this late date to emotionally and psychologically accept she is a Mama’s Girl who needs to be her authentic self and not some Daddy’s Girl perception of her.”
The good news, he said, is that her handlers have realized that a “kinder, more empathetic Hillary is a more authentic Hillary” and, in recent months, her campaign has “emphasized a friendlier and more humorous side of her.”
She can be erratic, however, which Erickson believes can hurt her chances.
Still, if Clinton embraces her softer, lighter, Mama’s Girl side and balances it with the toughness of a Daddy’s Girl, Erickson believes her national stature and experience on the political stage can make her the first woman to be elected president.
As he wrote: “In the 200-plus year history of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton is our most significant woman political leader to date.”
So, if she wins, could she be the topic of his next book?
Might this become a series?
“I’m not even thinking about it right now,” Erickson said. “It takes so long to put out a book nowadays. I finished the book in June and it’s just coming out.”
And for his efforts?
“The book sells for $16.95 and, after my literary agent takes 15 percent, I get about $3 per book,” Erickson said, adding that his books are for sale through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. “I made about $20,000 on the first book, but that was for two years’ work. So I’m not getting rich off this.”
Maybe this one will do better.
