Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann believes American voters aren't as sympathetic to women as they might be to racial men. Which is exactly why she says Hillary Clinton won't be America's next president, UK MailOnline reported.
Bachmann said U.S. voters "aren't ready" for a female president and don't hunger to break new ground the way they did with Barack Obama.
"I think there was a cachet about having an African-American president because of [civil rights] guilt," the outspoken conservative told Tribune Media Services columnist Cal Thomas, in a piece that first ran February 18.
"People don't hold guilt for a woman," she said, and even as Americans elect women at every other level of government, "I don't think there is a pent-up desire' to call someone 'Madam President.'"
While Clinton has been a fixture in U.S. politics since the early 1990s, Obama had the advantage of being "new and different," Bachmann added.
"Based off her own personal experience, Rep. Bachmann found that voters weren't simply interested in electing a president based on their gender," Bachmann spokesman Dan Kotman told MailOnline, "but were focused on finding a candidate based on their merits."
"Isn't that what the feminist movement is all about?"
During 2011 and 2012, after details of Bachmann debilitating migraines emerged, her months in a heated presidential primary battle ended.
She was the sole female in a nine-person GOP field, UK MailOnline reported. Hillary Clinton played that role on the Democratic side of the political ledger in 2008, and lasted far longer than the Bachmann would four years later.
Before fading in the end and losing the nomination to Barack Obama, the former U.S. senator and first lady won the New Hampshire Democratic Primary.
According to UK MailOnline, with Hillary on the far left and Bachmann on the far right, there's no love lost between the two.
If Clinton were to succeed her husband in the White House, Bachmann said, "effectively she would be Obama's third and fourth term in office" since she was "the godmother of Obamacare" in 1993.
But Hillary is beatable, she added
"She has a real problem when it comes to Benghazi," said Bachmann of the 2012 terror attack in Libya that unfolded during Clinton's time as Secretary of State. "She was in charge during the Benghazi debacle. If a person reads the Senate Intelligence report and the House Foreign Affairs report released [last] week, it is damning for Hillary Clinton," the tea party darling told the columnist.
Not running for re-elections, Bachmann is facing a cloud of ethics uncertainties stemming from payments her campaign-related organizations made to an Iowa state legislator while he was stumping for her in the run-up to the 2012 Iowa Caucuses, UK MailOnline reported.
But Kotman said that Clinton's shortcomings will end her career without reaching America's political pinnacle.
"The former Secretary of State has many glaring challenges to address," he said.
