‘Vote for Mom’
By ROBIN TONER
New York Times, Jan. 29, 2007
WASHINGTON — Some women were struck by the politics of maternity practiced by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in recent weeks, the imagery and stagecraft that highlighted their roles as mothers and/or grandmothers. For some, the issues were complicated: Is this a throwback, or a step forward? Is it politically smart?
For a long time women seeking high office, particularly executive office, were advised to play down their softer, domestic side, and play up their strength and qualifications. Focus groups often found voters questioning whether women were strong enough, tough enough, to lead. Emily’s List, the Democratic women’s group, warned in an internal memo in 1988 that women must “fight throughout their campaigns to establish their qualifications, power, toughness and capacity to win.” Breakthrough candidates like Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who campaigned unsuccessfully for governor under the slogan “tough and caring” in 1990, worked hard to ease those doubts...Today, many political strategists say women no longer have to be so defensive. Voters have grown more accustomed to women in powerful positions. And women like Ms. Pelosi and Mrs. Clinton, whatever other problems they may have, have been on the public scene long enough and are familiar enough players in the architecture of power that they no longer have to prove their strength day in and day out. In fact, strong leadership was seen as one of Mrs. Clinton’s core attributes in a CBS News Poll, conducted Jan. 18-21. 64% of the men surveyed, and 75% of the women, said Mrs. Clinton had strong qualities of leadership.
What this means, strategists say, is that motherhood and a focus on children can become one more political asset to be showcased — a way of humanizing a candidate and connecting with voters, especially other women. Ms. Pelosi took the speaker’s gavel, ordinarily a moment of raw legislative power, in a carefully structured tableau filled with children, some of them her own grandchildren. Mrs. Clinton held the first event of her presidential campaign surrounded by children at a health care clinic, where she announced her support for expanded health coverage for children. Aides to both women object to the idea that this is in any way contrived. Ms. Pelosi did, in fact, raise five children before she ran for office, and Mrs. Clinton raised one and has been an advocate on children’s issues since her days in law school. But candidates decide how to tell their story — George W. Bush highlighted his bipartisan friendships and alliances when he ran in 2000 — and there are good political reasons for Ms. Pelosi and Mrs. Clinton to highlight the maternal.
For Ms. Pelosi, relentlessly caricatured by the Republicans last year as a hard-edged, tax-raising liberal, the image of mother and grandmother takes the edge off the ideological cartoon. As Karen O’Connor, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University, puts it, “For Nancy Pelosi, it becomes, ‘O.K., am I going to be the San Francisco liberal, or the woman who relates to all voting women, because I’ve raised five kids, I have several wonderful grandchildren and I can also run your House.’ ”
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For Mrs. Clinton, highlighting the maternal is a way of building on what polls and strategists suggest are her clear advantages, like strength and intelligence, while compensating for what are widely considered her liabilities: a coolness, an excess of caution and a capacity to so polarize the electorate that many voters question her ability to win.
Several analysts said this softer approach also allowed Ms. Pelosi and Mrs. Clinton to offer a clear contrast with the leadership style of President Bush, which Democrats have asserted was a “my way or the highway” approach to governing.
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Democrats also seem less worried these days about the old charge of being the “mommy party,” dedicated to domestic concerns while the Republicans, “the daddy party,” are trusted with national security. Democratic women were often warned over the years that the stereotypes of party and sex reinforced each other.
National security remains a threshold issue for voters but is no longer such an automatic advantage for the Republicans because they have lost so much support on the war in Iraq, the polls suggest. And neither Ms. Pelosi nor Mrs. Clinton is neglecting these issues. On the campaign trail in Iowa on Saturday, Mrs. Clinton argued that all of this — security, maternity, affordable health care — was part of her potential-first-woman-president package. “I’m going to be asking people to vote for me based on my entire life and experience,” she said. “The fact that I’m a woman, the fact that I’m a mom, is part of who I am.”
But there has been some debate in recent weeks about the uses of motherhood, on the left and the right. After Ms. Pelosi assumed the speakership, in a week of events that repeatedly highlighted children, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, wrote on her blog, “I wonder why Pelosi, a woman I admire, seemed so keen to use her first day as speaker to portray herself as a traditional, family-first kind of woman...Many of the women I spoke to worry that the photo fed into the image of woman as one-dimensional.”
We may need a primay for the primaries at this rate.
And why the hell is Gore in there? Did I miss something???
