Friday afternoon at 2:30 p.m., thousands of Iowa State students and faculty, Ames residents, Iowa citizens and media personnel gathered in CY Stephens auditorium.

They were all there for one purpose: Elizabeth Dole was coming to town.

Although Dole hasn’t yet declared a run at the presidency, she is already considered a front-runner for the Republican nomination, along with Texas Governor George W. Bush and Lamar Alexander, former governor of Tennessee.

And this had people all over the country, including me, excited about next year’s election.

See, I have a confession to make. I want to elect a woman president.

A woman in the White House would do the most for American women since the adoption of the 19th Amendment.

Women have, of course, made great strides in the 79 years since suffrage. But anyone who looks at the percentages of women and men in political office knows that equality is still a long way off.

In the 1999 U.S. Congress, women constitute 13 percent of the House of Representatives and only 9 percent of the Senate. Women account for a mere 28 percent of state elected executive officials and 22.3 percent of state legislatures. And of the 50 state governors, only three are women.

Keep in mind that according to the Census Bureau’s November 1998 population estimates, women make up 51 percent of the population.

Doesn’t seem very representative, does it?

The number of women in office has been steadily improving. But nothing will encourage women to get involved in politics like a woman in the highest political office.

And 1999 may be the year.

Elizabeth Dole could be the first viable female candidate in the history of American politics. And judging from her stops in New Hampshire and Iowa last week, she could throw her hat in at any moment.

The only thing missing from Dole’s “campaign” was any kind of platform, any ideology that might give voters a real insight into the first possible female president.

That is why I showed up at Stephens Friday, waiting to hear what Dole might have to offer the country, hoping she might be the moderate woman I could vote into office.

Unfortunately, I came away disappointed.

Dole didn’t announce a presidential bid or even an exploratory committee during her speech, as many hoped she would. But what she did say in her hour-long lecture was as telling as a full-blown campaign announcement would have been.

Instead of speaking on the role of women in politics and leadership, Dole talked extensively about her vision for America — a conservative, self-righteous America afraid of the future. However, Dole never gave any concrete solutions to any of the problems she shared — a classic conservative move.

Dole attacked the decline of America, saying that everything from education to values to drug use has worsened since she was young — another classic conservative ploy.

Dole espoused the virtues of the way things used to be, when children could play until sunset without worrying about what might happen. She attacked the current drug use, even referring to Iowa’s “penetrating” methamphetamine problem.

Dole advocated returning to our roots in educating our students, teaching the basics and perhaps even establishing a voucher system.

(Although, Dole doesn’t seem to want to protect students while they are in school. She bemoaned the fact that we have implemented “harassment laws for schoolyard kisses,” a possible reference to the case before the Supreme Court holding a school responsible for a student grabbing the breasts and crotch of a classmate.)

Dole also assailed the moral character of the country and its politicians, insinuating that the moral lapses in Washington are a problem rooted in the 1990s.

“Individual and national character is what we need,” she said, in one of several barely veiled references to President Clinton. How quickly Dole forgot that even in her youthful days in the 1960s and ’70s politicians were cheating on their wives — politicians like Bob Dole, who abandoned his first wife and daughter in 1971.

I decided long ago that I would never vote for a woman candidate just because she was a woman. Although Dole may win some votes because of her status as a woman, a Republican woman will need to have a serious, progressive campaign platform with solutions to today’s real problems before she will ever coerce many Democrat women to leave their party.

I went to Elizabeth Dole’s speech Friday hoping she would distance herself from the politics of her conservative husband and be the moderate woman who could actually lead America. I left realizing I could never vote for her.

Oh, well. There’s always 2004.

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Sara Ziegler is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Sioux Falls, S.D.