The Democrats' Woman Problem
by 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.
(Click here to read the complete article.)
Blog For Iowa 
From my perspective, women's issues have completely taken a back burner on all fronts – particularly since the only thing discussed is “abortion”.
It's really shocking to me that in 2005, one of the big issues that has been thrown into the TV spotlight is pharmacies restricting access to *birth control*. (Birth control!)
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