It's My Party (21 page)

Like Betsey Bayless, Carol Springer thus had an impressive story to tell. It was about a hardworking woman who had made her
way in the world. And like Bayless, Springer saw her story as
her
story, not an emblem for the oppressed sisterhood of America. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I asked Springer if she
was proud of having broken the glass ceiling.

“I’m no feminist,” Springer replied. “No way. Not me.”

As I asked her one question after another about gender politics, Springer gave me a look that Miss Kitty used to give Festus,
indicating that, although she found me entertaining, she thought I was a fool. Springer was pro-choice and pro-gun, but she
didn’t see what being a woman had to do with either. She maintained that during the campaign of 1998, gender was never an
issue. “It was almost like the voters woke up afterward and said, ‘Look what we’ve done.’ It was that way for the women who
got elected, too. During the campaign we never gave our gender a thought.”

Stymied, I searched for a question that would redeem the interview. Maybe Springer and the other women who ran Arizona hadn’t
set out to become role models, I thought. But they’d been in office over a year now. “Have you noticed anything,” I said,
desperately, “that women officeholders do differently from men?”

Springer replied, “Not a damn thing.”

* * *

The president of the senate, Brenda Burns, had only a few moments to spare before returning to the chamber. Giving me the
answer I had by now come to expect, Burns, an elegant, dark-haired woman in her late forties, told me that women had risen
to the top of the Republican Party in Arizona because of their abilities, not their gender. “Every one of us would tell you
that,” she said. Was there anything Republicans should do to reach out to women? Aside from making sure that no one was discriminated
against, no. People needed to be judged on their merits, and the GOP was good at doing just that. “If you look at the presidential
nominees currently, it is the Republican Party that has both a woman [Elizabeth Dole] and a black man [Alan Keyes] up as candidates.
That really is one of the core beliefs of the Republican Party—that it looks at people on their merits.”

When I asked if women conducted themselves in office any differently from men, Burns chuckled. Since so many women raised
families—she has three children herself—they got used to juggling a lot of different tasks at once. “That does come in handy,”
Burns said. Then she had to run.

Governor Jane Dee Hull was polite, but the briskness with which she answered my questions made it clear that she had more
important matters to attend to than gender politics. In her mid-sixties, the grandmother of eight, Hull has auburn hair, a
birdlike nose, and bright, piercing eyes. While all the women with whom I spoke made me feel silly, Governor Hull made me
feel ignorant, too. Women had always played a prominent role in the state, she said. When Arizona held its constitutional
convention in 1910—two years before Arizona became a state and ten years before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote—a
dozen women participated. “Women came out here in covered wagons,” Hull said. “They gave birth along the side of the trail
with Indians attacking them.” Compared with giving birth while dodging arrows, drafting a constitution must have been a piece
of cake.

How had women risen to positions of such prominence in the Arizona GOP? It was a simple matter of seniority, the governor
said. A cadre of capable women had become active in the party, then risen just the way men would have risen. Did the governor
consider herself a feminist? No. Did women conduct themselves any differently in office from men? Only in small ways. “Governor
Fife Symington preceded me,” Governor Hull said. “Fife is by nature more confrontational.” That was putting it mildly. Like
his fellow Republican, Governor Mecham, before him, Governor Symington, forced to vacate his office in the midst of a scandal,
had launched vicious attacks on his political enemies. (While Mecham, accused of misusing state funds, was ultimately acquitted,
Symington was convicted of bank fraud.) “I think women are much more willing to bring people to the table and sit down and
talk about an issue.” Women, in other words, behaved like adults.

On the one hand I had Jack, who ascribed the gender gap to the credulity and passivity of women. On the other I had the women
officeholders of Arizona, who were so obviously non-credulous and nonpassive that I hadn’t even dared to raise Jack’s point
of view in their presence. Confused, I turned to Kellyanne Fitzpatrick. Kellyanne, thirty-three, is the president of her own
firm, the Polling Company, based in Washington, D.C. I hoped that, since she is both a professional political consultant,
like Jack, and an immensely successful Republican woman, like the officeholders with whom I spoke in Arizona, Kellyanne could
clear things up. She began by disabusing me of the notion that two of the so-called women’s issues, guns and abortion, had
anything to do with the gender gap.

It was true that women disliked guns, Kellyanne explained. “To many women, guns represent the last tiny basket of things in
this world that they simply can’t control. Women are better educated than they used to be. They’re self-sufficient economically.
But they still can’t control kids opening fire in classrooms for no reason.” Yet their dislike of guns doesn’t mean women
dislike the GOP. On the contrary, their dislike of guns draws them to the GOP at least as much as it repels them from it.
Why? The Republican Party is tough on crime.

“If Republicans anchor themselves to ‘do nothing’ about guns when women are crying out, ‘do something,’ that will cost them,”
Kellyanne said. “But that’s not what Republicans are doing.” Although they defend the right to bear arms more vigorously than
Democrats, Republicans nevertheless support the registration of handguns, bans on assault weapons, and so on. You might conclude
that the GOP’s stand on guns is inconsistent. You cannot conclude that it accounts for the gender gap.

Nor can you attribute the gender gap to the GOP’s pro-life stand. “Abortion is an issue that has lost intensity and will continue
to do so,” Kellyanne said. “It’s a case of ‘the fetus beat us.’ ” A minor medical development, the widespread use of sonograms,
has made a large political difference. “People will find a sonogram on the bulletin board of a colleague while she’s expecting,
or their father will fax them a sonogram with a note that says, ‘Here’s your newest cousin!’ It’s nonconfrontational. Nobody
sticks the sonogram in their face and says, ‘This is a baby, damn it!’ or ‘This is nothing but a pollywog, damn it!’ People
just see the sonogram, and they get used to the idea that the fetus is already part of somebody’s family.” Abortion remains
an issue, of course. But science is quickly replacing religion as the framework in which the debate over abortion takes place.
Women therefore see pro-life Republicans less as strident moralists, attempting to impose their views on others, than as advocates,
discussing medical facts. Women still feel more strongly about abortion than do men. Yet they do so in numbers much too small
to account for the gender gap. For that matter, those who feel most strongly about abortion tend to vote for Republicans,
not against them.

After making certain I understood that guns and abortion, the two issues you’re most likely to hear cited as the reasons for
the gender gap, actually have nothing to do with the gender gap, Kellyanne let me in on the true reasons. “There are three,”
she said, “and number one is a big one. Men and women just fundamentally differ about the role of government in their lives.”

Men want government out of their lives, and their approach toward dealing with it can be neatly summarized using vivid verbs.
Cut. Slash. Hack. Hew. Bash. “Women have their feet pointed in the same direction, but their pace of change is a lot less
rapid and aggressive,” Kellyanne explained. The female approach to dealing with government can best be summarized using tepid
verbs. Trim. Modify. Adjust. “Republicans keep saying they want a revolution. But every time they do that, they lose women’s
votes. Women don’t want a Republican revolution. They want a Republican—what would the word be? Something smaller. They want
a Republican ripple.”

The second reason for the gender gap was a matter of the heart—specifically, that women are uncertain Republicans actually
have hearts. “I call it the compassion gap,” Kellyanne said. Women see Democrats as decent, warm, caring human beings, the
sort of people with whom they’d be willing to leave their children for a weekend, while they see Republicans as ogres of the
sort who might eat their children for lunch. Democrats nice, Republicans nasty. Women just can’t get the comparison out of
their minds. “Whoever gets the GOP presidential nomination, all that Al Gore or Bill Bradley will have to do is run ads wrapping
Republicans who come across as nasty—people like Jesse Helms and Tom DeLay—around his neck. With women, it’s an obvious strategy.”

The final reason for the gender gap was the media. “Men and women receive their news and information from essentially different
outlets,” Kellyanne explained. While men are 12 percent more likely than women to read a newspaper every day, women are 14
percent more likely than men to cite ABC, NBC, CBS, or CNN as their primary source of news. “Women actually assign a certain
level of guilt to holding a newspaper in their hands, because when they’re reading a newspaper, that is literally all they
can do at that moment.” With the television droning in the background, by contrast, women can fold laundry, make dinner, or
review their children’s homework.

When women do have a moment to spare, they curl up with a woman’s magazine. Add up the circulation of just six magazines—
Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Day
, and
McCall’s
—and you’d find that they reached more than 30 million women. “These magazines get women to trust them by giving their readers
health and nutrition information—articles like ‘Avoiding Risky Vitamins for Your Kids’ or ‘Caring for an Elderly Parent,’
” Kellyanne said. “But the editorial content is all to the left. And when the magazines put Mrs. Clinton on the cover, readers
think Hillary must be as wholesome as good nutrition.”

Women differ from Republicans on the role of government, find Republicans wanting in compassion, and receive their information
from news organizations that are, broadly speaking, liberal, not conservative, in their makeup. “When it comes to the gender
gap,” Kellyanne said, “those three reasons are it.”

* * *

Kellyanne’s analysis was based on years of experience in conducting polls and interpreting their results. But it still left
me feeling a little uneasy. Although she and Jack had only one explicit point of agreement—that women get their news from
different sources than do men—her view and Jack’s came to pretty much the same thing. Women were … irrational. If men said
they wanted to slash, bash, and hew the government, they were expressing a reasoned assessment of their own interests. Less
government would mean lower taxes, and therefore bigger paychecks. But if women said they wanted only to trim or adjust government,
what did they mean? That the federal government, which each year spends more than $1.8
trillion
, an amount equal to a fifth of the total goods and services produced by the entire economy, is indeed too big, but only by
a smidgen? What sense did that make? And if women found Republicans lacking in compassion, what was their basis for doing
so? Reading
Cosmopolitan
every month but never picking up a newspaper? The economic boom that Ronald Reagan began has done a lot more good for the
poor than any welfare program ever did. Even such supposedly heartless Republicans as Senator Jesse Helms and Representative
Tom DeLay have done a lot of good for the poor, preventing the Clinton administration from enacting tax hikes and spending
programs that would have impeded the boom. Can’t women see that?

Of course there are exceptional women, like those running Arizona. But the reason for the gender gap is that millions of women
can’t
think
. I didn’t like that conclusion. But I couldn’t see any way around it.

Then I spoke to Newt Gingrich again.

It was a chance meeting, as if in a novel. This was fitting. My exploration of gender politics had started to seem like a
flawed work of nineteenth-century fiction, traveling in circles instead of proceeding to a destination. Appearing from nowhere—actually,
he was visiting California for a couple of days from Washington—Gingrich provided the sudden denouement that permitted me
to draw the effort to a close.

“If you want to make the gender gap disappear, all you have to do is make just one statistical correction,” Gingrich explained.

The correction involved single women. Once single women are removed from the data pool, Republicans get about as many votes
among women—limited, now, to married women—as they do among men. What accounts for the statistical anomaly? What leads married
women to vote Republican while single women vote Democratic? Economics.

By and large, married women are economically secure. They feel no need for the government to help or protect them, so they
are content to vote for the GOP, the party of limited government. But single women are often economically exposed. Young single
women, particularly those with children, frequently depend on welfare, food stamps, and other forms of government assistance.
Old single women, many of them widows—and since women tend to outlive men, there are millions more widows than widowers—frequently
depend on Social Security and Medicare. Young and old, single women vote for the Democratic Party, which they correctly see
as the party of the welfare state.