The Democrats' Woman Problemby Martha Burk, TomPaine.com
Martha Burk is a political psychologist and author of Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in Corporate America and What Can Be Done About It , released last month from Scribner.
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] 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.
...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.
...Leaving women out of the debate was not new for the Democrats. They have shown us in the last two elections that they don’t want to be too vocal about women. Every time George Bush said to Al Gore, “I don’t trust the government, I trust the people,” Gore had the perfect opportunity to counter with “except for women in making their own decisions about their own bodies.” He never once took that opportunity. In 2004, the Dems avoided “women’s issues” at every turn, even taking the Equal Rights Amendment out of the platform for the first time in 40 years. When their own internal polling showed the pay gap as one of the top concerns for women, the candidate didn’t want to talk about it publicly. As for the abortion issue, only those far inside the Beltway could decode Kerry’s rambling answer in the final debate to conclude he was — sorry, Howard — pro-choice. Even so, the DNC is now blaming the loss on “being forced into the idea of defending the idea of abortion,” according to Dean.
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