By: Politico

The optimism was palpable when Michelle Bachelet became the first female president of Chile in 2005 and when Cristina Fernandez Kirchner was elected to the presidency in neighboring Argentina soon after. There seemed to be a coming wave of new female leadership in the world, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in the U.S., was the go-to example. If Bachelet and Kirchner could navigate the rocky electoral terrains of conservative Latin American countries, then surely Clinton, the well-funded front-runner in a country tired of President Bush, would glide to victory?

Apparently not. Why did these South American women succeed when Clinton’s run sputtered to a halt?

What lessons from their campaigns could Clinton have applied to her own?

Bachelet was a nontraditional candidate. A divorced physician who bore children out of wedlock and who had been tortured by Chilean President Augusto Pinochet’s military regime, she didn’t pander to conservative constituencies. In the course of her campaign, she was forced to address various rumors about her past in addition to her cardinal sins of agnosticism and feminism. Her opponents openly questioned whether a woman was as capable of running the country as a man.

But Bachelet continued to do photo-ops with women, indigenous minorities and babies under the banner of her campaign slogan, “I’m With You.” “Her photos had a maternal, nurturing image,” said Jorge Rivera, a municipal government photographer in Santiago.

“Because of machista campaign attacks, we wanted to show that her gender would enable her to do things differently,” said Ricardo Solari, Bachelet’s campaign manager.

This included refraining from negative campaigning. Clinton should have noted Bachelet’s reluctance to engage in dirty politics. Said Solari: “Hillary spent too much time attacking [Barack] Obama instead of showing her own virtues. Her negative style shows she’s coming from the establishment, following its way of doing things.”

Bachelet elegantly fought the assertion that women are not effective leaders by portraying her gender as an advantage. But this idea obviously stung Clinton, and her zealous efforts to prove her ability to lead the country — “It’s 3 a.m. Who do you want answering the phone?” — led to the landing-in-Bosnia-under-sniper-fire debacle. Moreover, the Chilean leader proposed a collaborative approach to policymaking, which resonated with those who had grown weary of ideological polarization in the post-Pinochet democracy. But voters in the United States rarely heard about the advantages of female policymakers, even though eight years of dogmatic gun-slinging had made the moment ripe for that discussion.

Ultimately, Bachelet succeeded in a society in which women and minorities have historically been excluded from power, because she represented change. In the U.S., it wasn’t predestined that Obama would be the “change” candidate. He would be the first African-American president, but Clinton would have been the first female commander in chief, so Obama’s monopoly on change was never inevitable.

Clinton could have represented the under-represented, despite her famous last name, by virtue of being a woman. Bachelet succeeded in portraying herself as a “transformational” candidate, despite her previous political experience and her affiliation with a party that had been in power for 20 years; Clinton should have done the same.

Biographically, Clinton has a lot in common with Kirchner, Argentina’s current president. The comparison was ubiquitous at the time of Kirchner’s election: Both were lawyers, senators and the female halves of dynamic political power couples. Both helped their husbands become governor and then president.

Buoyed by her husband’s high approval ratings, then-first-lady Kirchner drew much of her support from lower-income workers and rural poor, the traditional Peronist party base. Clinton shored up support along similar demographic lines. The pundits called her “shrill,” “frigid” and “screechy,” but a description Clinton chose to perpetuate — “tough” — was one from which Kirchner fled. The Argentine was known for her combative speaking style, but her communications advisers counseled her to be warmer and more emotional. It might be true that Kirchner took the advice too far, at the risk of appearing frivolous (her opponent dubbed her the Botox Queen.) Clinton wouldn’t have had to parade around in pink dresses and hair extensions to display her womanhood, but a less antagonistic tone would have helped her campaign. She needed to inject softness into her general message, not only on isolated occasions — it gave the pundits ammunition to say, for example, that her tears were “calculated” — but overall. In this election, highlighting feminine qualities such as sensitivity and inclusiveness could have helped propel her to victory.

So what could Clinton have learned from Bachelet and Kirchner? It’s true that questions like these are difficult because every election is unique, and because the answers tend to involve a lot of “could haves” and “should haves.” But Clinton’s misreading of the electorate’s mood is evident: This was a “change” election, but she wagered, incorrectly, that experience would win it. Kirchner and Bachelet both had impressive political résumés, yet neither felt the need to compensate for her femininity. Clinton should have considered the campaigns of her Latin American counterparts while she made her run for the presidency. All she needed to do in her climb upward was look south.

Ashley Steinberg is a freelance journalist based in Santiago, Chile.

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