Will Women Sweep Hillary Into the White House? Not likely according to her…

By Linda Hirshman
Posted Sunday, January 28, 2007 in the Washington Post

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.

In every election, there’s a chance that women will be the decisive force that will elect someone who embraces their views. Yet they seem never to have done so, and I’ve never seen a satisfactory answer as to why. 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.

Neither the former teacher nor the retired television reporter read any newspapers at all.

There are some constants. Most of the women read People and Real Simple magazines. They all listen to news on the car radio, mostly National Public Radio. And almost all their full-time working husbands consume immeasurably more political information than they do. (”He reads 10 times what I do,” one told me), reading news magazines and political Web sites and bringing home political information from their jobs. The women gather little information from their almost exclusively female society of other stay-at-home moms.

(more…)

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 By David S. Broder - The Washington Post

WASHINGTON - When Lt. Gen. David Petraeus came before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week in open session, its members understandably had many questions for the new commander of American forces in Iraq.
They knew of his reputation as a battlefield leader, a trainer of Iraqi troops and the author of the Army manual on counterinsurgency warfare. They also recognized the difficulty and importance of his new assignment.
Many of the questions probed deeply into the rationale for the president’s new strategy of injecting more U.S. troops into Baghdad neighborhoods wracked by killings by rival Sunni and Shiite gangs. Others challenged the readiness of Iraqi forces and the Baghdad government to do their part in reducing sectarian violence.
A few of the questions were naive, self-serving or off on tangents. But virtually the entire membership of the committee was present and senators of both parties recognized the value of probing this experienced and candid witness.

With one exception. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York used her time to make a speech about Iraq policy and did not ask a single question of the man who will be leading the military campaign.
Her speech replayed some of the themes from her news conference the previous week, on her return from Iraq, when she made clear her disagreement with President Bush’s decision to add 21,500 soldiers and
Marines to Petraeus’ force.

She began by blaming the Iraq crisis on a “Congress (that) was supine under the Republican majority, failing to conduct oversight and demanding accountability, and because the president and his team, particularly the former secretary of defense (Don Rumsfeld), refused to adapt to the changing circumstances on the ground.”
From that partisan opening, Clinton went on to decry “the failures of the Iraqis to step up and take responsibility for their own future.” She said the escalation Bush ordered was too little and too late, and instead called on Congress to “threaten to cut money for the Iraqi troops and for the security for the Iraqi leadership,” as a way to break the political gridlock in Baghdad and force efforts at national reconciliation.
She wound up the speech by saying that despite her disagreement with the policy, she wanted Petraeus’ assurance that “we have every possible piece of equipment and resource necessary to protect these young men and women” going into battle.

“I’ll do that, senator,” Petraeus said, and after that four-word response, Clinton was finished. She had no questions to ask.
Judging by all the polls, Clinton is the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a leading candidate for the Republican nomination, is also a member of the Armed Services Committee.

McCain asked Petraeus 14 questions, ranging from the political situation in Iraq to the morale of the troops to the time line for the planned “surge.” He ran out of time before he ran out of questions - quite a contrast to Clinton.

Clinton aides said the senator thought it was important to rebut the comments from several other committee members suggesting that congressional resolutions opposing the president’s policy would “undercut the troops,” so she used her time for that purpose. But I can think of three other possible explanations for her remarkable reluctance to probe the general’s thinking.

First, she has been treading a careful line from her early support of military action against Saddam Hussein to an increasingly sharp criticism of the war and calls for troop reductions. Perhaps she feared that dialogue with Petraeus would lead her into dangerous, uncharted waters. Caution is commendable, but she is sometimes faulted for being too calculating.

Second, the hearing came only three days after she announced her presidential exploratory committee, and she may have decided it was a good opportunity to repeat her views on Iraq policy before TV cameras rather than share time with the general. That wouldn’t say much about her priorities as she begins a second six-year term as senator, but New York voters last November presumably knew she might have loftier goals than just minding her Senate duties.
The third, less-benign possibility is that Clinton is reverting to the mode of her ill-fated 1993-94 health-care initiative, when she gave members of Congress and other interested folks the impression that she thought she had all the answers - so please just do as I say. In that period, she and her deputy, Ira Magaziner, two of the smartest policy wonks in captivity, were also supremely self-confident - and in some eyes, arrogant. And it cost them support, even among potential allies.

Last week, Clinton began her presidential campaign, as she did her first race for the Senate in New York, by saying she wanted to do a lot of listening. She sure wasn’t listening to Gen. Petraeus. She wasn’t even asking.