The Democrats' Woman Problem

By Martha Burk, TomPaine.com. Posted June 2, 2005

Is the Democratic Party's obsession with framing pushing women out of the picture?

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told Tim Russert on "Meet The Press" last week that if he could strike the words "choice" and "abortion" out of the lexicon of the Democratic party, he would. Echoing George Lakoff’s influential book -- "Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate" -- Dean said, "When you talk about framing this debate the way it ought to be framed... this is an issue about who gets to make up their minds." Lakoff, the current darling of party strategists agonizing over what went wrong in the last election, says the Dems didn’t get their ideas out in a way that fit the emotional "frames" already in people’s minds about the role of government in their lives.

The Democrats put out reams of facts about Bush’s lies on weapons of mass destruction, his hypocrisy on Leave No Child Behind and his plans to dismantle Social Security. In spite of this overwhelming evidence that Bush is bad for the country, people voted for him anyway. Ominously for the future, women -- historically the largest bloc in the Democratic base -- voted Republican in greater numbers than they have in recent history. The gender gap, a mainstay for the Democrats since 1980, virtually disappeared, with Kerry beating Bush among women by only three percent.

Lakoff is probably right that Bush’s appeal to women and men alike was more emotional than rational. But the erosion of women’s support for Democrats was also a result of the Kerry campaign strategy. The Kerry campaign shied away from talking to women at all, choosing instead to go for the white male warrior vote. Women’s advocates were alarmed about this from the beginning, when the Democrats refused to fund a strategy to get women to the polls, while the Bush team had a person in every precinct who was responsible for turning out the female "W" vote.

Even female Republican pollsters like Kellyanne Conway admit that women lean Democratic "if left to their own devices." That’s because women depend more on the social safety net (the compassionate "parent government" in Lakoff-speak), and the Democrats have traditionally stood for better social services like expanding health care and child care, and ensuring retirement through Social Security (women’s main source of retirement income ). But the Democrats failed to exploit this natural advantage, instead trying to out-tough-guy Bush on the war and homeland security. According to the Votes for Women 2004 project, Republican women’s events were about how much the campaign valued women, while Democratic women’s events were about extracting money from female donors to use on general campaign themes. Significantly, among women who stayed away from the polls, homeland security ranked third behind the top concerns of jobs and economic security and health care security.

http://www.alternet.org/story/22138/

"Private--no, make that personal--accounts"
"The nuclear--no, make that constitution--option"

Dean was pointing out that it's the REPUBLICANS who consciously frame and reframe things in order to sell a distorted message. I know TomPaine is a good-guy site, and I don't know who this Martha Burk is but I don't like where she's going with this essay, which sounds like she bats for the other side.

"It's rather late in the day for Martha Burk to be complaining about the Democrats abandoning women. As the leader of a prominent women's organization (the National Council of Women's Organizations) surely this can't be anything new to her nor something for which she bares no responsibility. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have ignored women and women's issues for decades. Yet she and the leaders of the other prominent feminist organizations (NOW and Feminist Majority) have consistently allied themselves so closely with the Democrats that they now find themselves in a similar position to the Democrats: visionless and powerless.

Because the NCWO membership includes many women's organizations which profess to be non-partisan, it had a unique opportunity to fill a gap by becoming a huge non-partisan women's organization. Instead NCWO squandered this opportunity. Instead of remaining truly non-partisan and focusing on building solidarity amongst women for non-partisan issues such as the Equal Rights Amendment (which would benefit all American women), the NCWO chose to add abortion and gay rights to NCWO's agenda. Had the NCWO remained removed from these "hot button" issues, Ms Burk might today be heading a women's organization that represents a majority of American women and one with the political clout to impact the agenda of both political parties."

it's impossible to judge anything about the 2002 and 2004 results with the current state of the voting machine problems.

That being said, Mary Beth Cahill (Kerry's campaign manager) seemed to be relentless in her focus on issues such as health care. So here I think the author is wrong.

I would posit that Kerry was seriously wounded when he let the Swifties and MSM play up the Vietnam slurs unchallenged for more than a month. If anything, Kerry lost the "warrior" vote when he refused to defend himself. Post election finger pointing seemed to indicate Cahill (and Bob Shrum) as the "masterminds" of this strategy.

It was the gravest mistake of the campaign.