By Agnes Krup

“Mami, are you crying?” my 8-year-old daughter inquired last night.

I was in our kitchen, preparing chicken noodle soup for dinner. It was 6:40 pm or so, and I had tuned in to one of my favorite radio programs, "Marketplace" on NPR, Which had just been interrupted for a live report featuring John Edwards‘ speech at Barack Obama’s appearance in Grand Rapids, Mich.

There was no doubt as to what this meant. This was the night the Democratic race was decided. I put down my cutting knife and I wept into the shallots.

I am a green card holder. I can’t even vote. Yet I have feverishly followed the Democratic race, unable to make up my mind. What do you do with so much talent, so much integrity, so much charisma and experience (and, yes, I mean Obama’s experience, too)?

But while my European friends had declared themselves in “Obama fever” months ago, I couldn’t go there. And last night, as it was all over, I realized that I had been a Clinton supporter all along. I realized I really wanted a woman to run this country.

I am German. I have come, slowly, to appreciate Germany’s Angela Merkel for her integrity and her talent of engaging, of working things out; a truly female quality, I think. I realized I wanted something similar to happen here.

But this is an old democracy, minted by conservative Christian beliefs. As Gloria Steinem pointed out so eloquently in her op-ed in The New York Times earlier this year, it is much harder in the United States to be elected president if you are a woman than if you are an African-American male (which Obama, as we all know, is no more than Derek Jeter, the integrative short stop of the New York Yankees).

At around 6:40 last night, I remembered Steinem’s column and I also remembered a recent comment I had heard on the radio, by a woman supporting Clinton: If not she, then who? Which other woman is out there who has the prominence, the experience, the charisma, the political hunger to become president of the United States in the next decade or two? And I wept over that lost chance.

By 6:50 p. m., I put dinner on the table. I had discarded the Kleenex my daughter had handed me. I felt a lot more chipper. As Gloria Steinem had also pointed out months ago, if Obama ended up being the formidable candidate, she’d throw her whole weight behind him. With whatever little weight I had in this, I would support him, too, especially with Edwards sort of back in, and with his speech basically offering a good job to Clinton.

We can’t do any better than with these three politicians teaming up. No matter who runs in which capacity, this is an amazing possibility for America. I will not have to defend my living in the United States anymore when I go to visit friends in Europe, all of whom have been nothing but disgusted with the last seven years (and that goes for conservative friends, too). I can hold my head up high again and point to the future.

And by 6:55 p. m., as my daughter carefully lined up tiny pieces of broccoli stems outside the soup bowl, something else was clear to me: That female voter who was so fearful of no other woman fit to run for First Office need not fear.

Hillary Clinton is a trailblazer. So is Nancy Pelosi, so are several female governors, senior senators and House members. And there is a whole generation of political talent just one step behind them, some of them well-profiled on WVFC, who are very qualified and ready to step up to the plate -– not in two decades, not in one, but perhaps four years down the road.

Let’s cheer them on, let’s support them, let’s keep up the good fight. And, for all her other stellar accomplishments, past, present and future, let us always be grateful to Hillary Rodham Clinton for what is — perhaps the greatest one among them — and for so severely cracking the glass ceiling that it will have to come tumbling down, sooner rather than later.