A former First Lady and a six-year New York senator who’s the first viable female candidate for President of the United States, Hillary Clinton stands out among the dozens of presidential candidates for the 2008 election. She’s definitely a frontrunner for the Democrats, and despite women presidential candidates being on the ballot for third parties before, as the nation is effectively bipartisan, Hillary Clinton shows the first real promise for breaking the tradition of electing only white males to the office of the president.

The United States, the so-called "melting pot" of cultures and land of endless possibilities, is one of the last first-world nations to have never elected a female president or prime minister. What would it take for the United States to elect a female president? Will Hillary Clinton be the one to break America’s presidential tradition?

If there was ever a time for a majority of Americans to deviate from tradition, it’s now, in one of the most long-running and competitive pre-election seasons ever seen in American history. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and the other Democratic presidential candidates might have the power to overtake the Republican candidate because of the low approval rating for the currently Republican executive branch of government.

Although not the 2/3 majority that Congress needs to enact any real change, the fact that the 2006 midterm elections led the Democratic Party to sweep aside the long-standing Republican majority in the House and Senate shows that America is ready for change. Hillary Clinton could be that change.

Who else among the presidential candidates has worked so intimately with the executive branch before, as wife of former President Bill Clinton? Who else was part of a support network for a presidency that aimed to and began to balance the national debt while cutting taxes for millions of low-income families and enacting change to make a steady, better economy?

Although Hillary Clinton was part of an administration mired with controversies, those controversies were for the most part personal and did not directly affect American citizens’ lives, unlike a long-term military quagmire or one day having to be responsible for paying back a national debt of over $8 trillion through higher taxes.

So far, Hillary Clinton promises in her campaign an end to the American presence in Iraq and a form of national health care. Many people happy with the current administration claim that these promises would lead to disaster. The problem is the United States is already in a disaster: in Iraq, for example, and when millions of Americans can’t afford to see the doctor.

The cry for change among American people is louder than ever. Electing Hillary Clinton as President of the United States is one way to see real change in the country—not only by electing the nation’s first woman president, but by radically pointing the country in new and promising directions.