In print | Published February 5, 2009

After Obama’s victory in November, a number of articles were published speculating about what the sex, religion, race and sexual orientation of America’s next president would be. 2008, it turns out, was the ideal year to pose that question. With the election of a black president in November, everything seemed suddenly possible. In light of a historic and unprecedented election, we are forced to turn to the next question: Who will our next president, four or eight years down the road, be? Will he be a Mormon? Will he even be a he? Are we ready to elect a queer president? Only the most cynical and regressive would suggest that race, gender, religion or sexual orientation are ever going to be absent from electoral politics from here on out.

Americans, however, aren’t the only ones who began 2009 with a landmark inauguration. Iceland swore in Johanna Sigurdardottir on Sunday as not only the country’s first female prime minister, but also the world’s first openly queer head of government. It is difficult to make a perfect comparison between Iceland’s situation and our own; Iceland’s population is less than a one-hundredth of ours, and because of their parliamentary system, Sigurdardottir was never popularly elected. But that doesn’t mean we can’t ask, in a return to our initial speculation, “What’s coming next for America?”

One of the best places to begin to unravel this puzzle is, interestingly, with the Republican Party. Since the 1960s, the Republican Party has catered to an almost exclusively white base and has incorporated relatively few politicians from minority backgrounds. Less than three months after the election of Barack Obama, however, the party that brought us Strom Thurmond and Sarah Palin has suddenly realized that it, too, may need greater minority representation if it is ever going to reclaim a dominant position in American politics.

Michael Steele, the newly elected black chair of the RNC, has openly acknowledged that the Republican Party must appeal to a wider base if it is to survive. In an interview with The Root, a news blog associated with Slate Magazine, Steele said that the Republican Party had a “fundamental image problem” and that he believes that the Republicans’ failure to appeal to the black community is a large part of the problem. “We are going to show up in the black community. We’re going to spend time in the black community and we’re going to spend money in the black community,” Steele said. While Steele’s moderate conservatism and eagerness to court minorities may not necessarily represent the sentiment of the Republican Party at large, it bears noting that Steele was elected by a body of GOP insiders, and that his closest rival lost support after it came out that he used to belong to an all-white country club.

And black leaders are hardly the only minority leaders being celebrated in GOP circles these days. Bobby Jindal, the Governor of Louisiana of Indian descent, has emerged as a favorite among party leaders to challenge Obama in 2012.

What this means is that even in the most conservative quarters of the nation, views on race are changing. The Republicans vying for the 2008 presidential nomination during the primaries were all white. It is unlikely that, come 2012, this will happen again.

What this doesn’t mean, however, is that things as they presently stand are anywhere close to acceptable. There is nowhere nearly enough minority representation in politics, and the current lack of diversity of the Senate is nothing short of depressing. Of the 100 members of the Senate body, one is black, two are Asian, and three are Hispanic. There are only 17 women, and there are zero queer politicians. Of the 100 Senators, 77 are white, male and, at least according to their websites, straight.

So, as significant as the election of Barack Obama was, the overall diversity of the federal government has changed little. What did change were the nation’s perceptions of race in politics. If Bobby Jindal does run for president in 2012, no one can suggest that we should view his poll numbers with skepticism.

America is at a crossroads. The election of Barack Obama, and the sheer amount of minorities who voted, have made it abundantly clear that minority politicians can win elections and that politicians without minority support will not. We can’t hazard a guess as to when we’ll see our first queer or female or Indian president. But 2008 was an excitingly diverse year in presidential politics, and we would be very surprised if 2012 and 2016 are not.

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