MSNBC’s O’Donnell: ‘You Have a Right to Be Tired of Men Running for President’

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” host Lawrence O’Donnell stated that people “have a right to wonder what America is capable of. You have a right to wonder what it takes for a woman to win the presidency.” And “have a right to be tired of men running for president. You have a right to be tired of watching men take the oath of office. You have a right to shed a tear today over where women are in American politics.”

O’Donnell said, “This is one of those days when you wonder what America is capable of, not in a good way. It’s not the feeling we had watching President Kennedy win the election in 1960 and realize altogether at once, as a country, that yes, a Roman Catholic could be elected president of the United States, which was not believed possible until John Kennedy did it. … You could feel American progress in that moment. You could feel a much more dramatic step in American progress when Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 in the overwhelmingly white state of Iowa, and then, as tears of joy fell from millions of eyes around the country, Barack Obama, joined by his family, gave a victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago the night he won the presidency.”

He added, “At the beginning of this presidential campaign, you had a right to believe, as I did, that it was possible that the Democratic Convention would nominate a woman for president and a woman for vice president. Because the most qualified field of women candidates in history were running for president.”

O’Donnell concluded, “And you have a right to wonder what America is capable of. You have a right to wonder what it takes for a woman to win the presidency. The world has passed us by on this point of social progress. … The United States is on its 45th male president, and you have a right to be tired of men running for president. You have a right to be tired of watching men take the oath of office. You have a right to shed a tear today over where women are in American politics.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett