The Democrats Think About Women
This morning's Real Clear Politics links to a fascinating article by feminist writer and political consultant Naomi Wolf in New York magazine. Ms. Wolf tries to explain why President Bush is pulling away from John Kerry among women voters.
Wolf argues that the real genius behind the Bush campaign is Karen Hughes, not Karl Rove, and that Hughes has skillfully deployed Laura Bush as a campaign weapon, as well as retooling the entire Republican image. I think her observations are mostly shrewd. Her comments on Teresa Heinz Kerry, however, are brutal:
The charges are sticking because of Teresa Heinz Kerry. Let’s start with “Heinz.” By retaining her dead husband’s name—there is no genteel way to put this—she is publicly, subliminally cuckolding Kerry with the power of another man—a dead Republican man, at that. Add to that the fact that her first husband was (as she is herself now) vastly more wealthy than her second husband. Throw into all of this her penchant for black, a color that no woman wears in the heartland, and you have a recipe for just what Kerry is struggling with now: charges of elitism, unstable family relationships, and an unmanned candidate.I am a feminist, but I still believe that a candidate’s spouse, male or female, needs to understand something that Republicans get now but Democrats still don’t: It is not about them. If you are a president’s wife—or husband—your life and imagery do not belong just to you. For the duration, you belong to us, and you need to reflect and respect our own aspirations and dreams.
While I agree with much that Wolf writes, there are two instances of cluelessness that, I think, help to illustrate why the Democrats, the party of hyper-feminism, have been unable to consistently secure the loyalty of a majority of American women.
Here's the first:
Laura Bush, in speaking warmly of her mate’s “wrestling” with issues of war and peace, enhances his potency. This does not contradict my earlier point about appealing to swing voters; it has been well established that modern women maddeningly long for men who are tender in private but authoritative in public.
"Maddeningly." Contemplate that for a moment. Now contemplate it again, in the context of a Presidential campaign. One can imagine, I guess, a world in which women don't prefer men--let alone Presidents!--who are "authoritative in public." But it isn't this world, and if Democrats find this fact maddening, they are condemning themselves to a long losing streak.
Here's the second:
Bush knows that Laura is his outreach to that swing voter in Michigan who is juggling work and family, who wants to feel that her abortion rights are secure and her kids are safe.
Put aside, for a moment, the, um, tension between those two supposed concerns. Do the Democrats really believe that a typical swing-voting Michigan mom, when she considers whom to vote for in a Presidential campaign, has, at the top of her list of concerns, the idea that she just might want an abortion at any moment? And that this hypothetical desire ranks right up there with her preference that her children not be blown up by terrorists?
For years, the Democrats have deluded themselves with the belief that their support for "women's issues" entitles them to women's votes, much as their support for race discrimination entitles them to African-Americans' votes. This could be the year when their obtuse, ham-handed view of women does them in.
