"Certainly the prestige of the office of president must be seriously compromised if a woman has a serious shot at it."

I would add "or a black man" to that conditional clause, but the subject of the article from which this quote was pulled is specifically that of the place of women in American society. The sentence is inserted as a parenthetical reality check inside the penultimate paragraph of Leslie Camhi's Village Voice review of "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at PS 1. She alludes to the current state of our national political life with this reminder of both how far we have come and how close we still remain to the more benighted environment of the 60's and 70's which inspired the feminist revolution:

Just how far we've traveled since those times might be measured by the fact that the female contender for the Democratic presidential nomination is perceived as the establishment candidate. (Certainly the prestige of the office of president must be seriously compromised if a woman has a serious shot at it.) But some things almost never change: It's nearly impossible, for example, to imagine this show being staged across the river, at P.S. 1's Manhattan affiliate, the Museum of Modern Art.

Instead, the artists of "Wack!" remain in the schoolhouse. But their contemporaries might well take a lesson from them.

[Presidential chart image by Automatic Preference whitosphere blog via Francis L. Holland]