Sunday, January 28, 2007; Page B01
Excerpts:
Hillary Rodham Clinton sure got it right when she announced her candidacy for president while sitting on her living room couch. Her success may very well turn on the decisions of millions of women sitting on their living room couches.
Clinton advisers James Carville and Mark Penn have said they're counting on a women's vote (the "X factor") to catapult their client into the White House. They're obviously hoping that a female candidate will get much more support from women and are banking on the "gender gap," the idea, trumpeted by the media and women's organizations, that women believe in liberal policies and will therefore, as rational political actors, support the Democratic Party.
But I have news for Messrs. Carville and Penn: All the gender gap talk notwithstanding, there's no guarantee that Clinton would receive enough votes from women to be elected. I've studied women and women's politics for 20 years, and if there's one thing I know, it's that, except for possibly once in 1996, female voters have not by themselves put anyone in the White House.
If Clinton is going to attract the women she needs, she's probably going to have to do something more than simply have a pair of X chromosomes herself. And much as it pains a feminist like me to say it, a lot of her campaign will have to involve putting her on the couch and analyzing her character and motivation. Again.
My own theory is that women don't decide elections because they're not rational political actors -- they don't make firm policy commitments and back the candidates who will move society in the direction they want it to go. Instead, they vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality.
With Clinton's candidacy on the horizon, I decided to test my theory by asking a few white, married women -- the key demographic -- what they are up to this time.
If any women were going to be politically aware, I figured, it would be those in the Washington area. So I contacted half a dozen members of the Wednesday Morning Group, a D.C. area organization that provides speakers and programs mostly for stay-at-home moms. (One even told me I had caught her sitting on her living room couch.)
All the women voted in the midterm elections last year and intend to vote in 2008. But how do they decide which lever to pull? My small sampling is admittedly unscientific, but what they told me reveals a lot about why campaigning to women is so tricky.
A 49-year-old former public relations executive in suburban Maryland told me she votes the political agenda she learned from her lefty father. She reads The Washington Post, but there are no books on her bedside table. She counts on her husband to tell her what's in the Nation magazine and on the Web.
A 36-year-old former financial sales executive considers herself an independent, reads only the Style and Weekend sections of The Post and the Marketplace and Personal Journal sections of the Wall Street Journal, and also counts on her husband, a Republican, to tell her what's interesting in the rest of the paper.
A former human rights activist told me that she still reads the New York Times, skims the Economist, and gathers political information from PBS's "News Hour," a local broadcast from the BBC and from her church.
They were clearly defensive about her decision to stay the course after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. "She set herself up in her life," one explained, "to get wherever she wanted to go. That's what men do all the time. . . . When a woman does it, what's wrong with that?"
I couldn't escape the fact that they took in little of politics, especially compared with their husbands, that their decision-making seemed impulsive and that their response to Clinton's candidacy was driven to an amazing extent by personality.
Unlike the married suburban women she must attract in large numbers, Clinton didn't stay home from work. Remember the "baking cookies" remark? On the other hand, she has had the soap opera story of the century with that charismatic, faithless husband. This has made her suffer, something one of the Wednesday women specifically singled out as a reason to support a candidate. Will she be willing to open that old wound to convince potential female supporters that her policies, such as universal child health care, arise out of her concern for women like them, rather than being just the usual liberal agenda? Worse, if she does play the wronged wife again, does she risk alienating the women who think she should have left her husband long ago?
A suffering wife and mother whose campaign mysteriously unleashes attacks on her opponents? It's not the current game plan, no doubt. But I'm drawing on the lessons of history. I'd rather promote cheery stories of the gender gap -- but those stories are just a diversion from the hard work of bringing women into the world of governance. Mark my words: Those who do not study women's history are doomed to repeat its failures.
