No woman president in 2016, Michele Bachmann says

America is "not ready" for a female president, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told columnist Cal Thomas this week (AP Photo).

America is “not ready” for a female president, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told syndicated columnist Cal Thomas this week (AP Photo).

2016 will not be the year for a woman to break the tallest glass ceiling in American politics, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said in a conversation with syndicated columnist Cal Thomas last week.

When asked whether Americans are ready to elect a woman to the highest public office held in the nation, Bachman told Thomas: “I don’t think there is a pent-up desire.”

Bachmann credited Obama’s victory among white voters to the “guilt” white Americans felt when faced with the possibility of electing a black man to office. But she said that same “guilt” will not apply if men are faced with the option to vote for a female candidate in 2016.

“I think there was a cachet about having an African-American president because of guilt,” she said. “People don’t hold guilt for a woman.”

Bachmann went on to call a vote for Clinton a vote for a third term with Obama, identifying her as the mastermind behind Obamacare and the U.S. official who holds the most blame for the 2012 Benghazi attack that left the U.S. ambassador to Libya, another diplomat, and two security personnel dead. Clinton was serving as Secretary of State at the time of the attack.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC), has regularly contradicted Bachmann’s opinion that Clinton is responsible for the deaths that occurred in those attacks. Last month, after the publication of an SIC review of the Benghazi incident, Feinstein released a statement discrediting Republicans who inflated Clinton’s role in the attacks.

“Statements on the Senate floor this morning and some media reports about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report on the attack against our diplomatic mission and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, intimate that the report assigns culpability to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the tragedy,” Feinstein said. “This is patently false. The report approved on a bipartisan basis says no such thing.”

Bachmann, who plans to leave the House in 2014 without seeking reelection, ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. She dropped out of the race following an unexpectedly poor performance in the Iowa caucuses.

Even if Bachmann thinks America isn’t ready for a female president, a Rasmussen poll released last month found that 77% of Americans expect to elect a woman to the oval office in the next decade. And with Hillary Clinton as the current frontrunner for the Democratic ticket, there is a good chance it could be her.

But Bachmann holds strong in her belief that whether it’s her gender or Benghazi, one of those factors is likely to bring Clinton down in 2016.

After saying that the United States just “isn’t ready” for a woman in the oval office, Bachmann went on to once again pin responsibility to Clinton for the deaths in Benghazi.

“Two things that need to be done: Remind people [Clinton] is seeking to become commander in chief [and] how she has operated in the past with these types of responsibilities,” she said. “She was in charge during the Benghazi debacle. If a person reads the Senate Intelligence [Committee] report and the House Foreign Affairs [Committee] report released last week, it is damning for Hillary Clinton.”

Siobhán O'Grady