The Democrats' Woman Problem

Martha Burk delivers a chilling and accurate assessment of the Democrats' Woman Problem. Dems spend far more time trying to find new and clever ways to talk about abortion rights than they actually spend talking about a woman's right to choose motherhood or not.

Like a lot of women, I winced during the presidential debates, when Kerry essentially said: I'm Pro Choice and I'm sorry.

I can't forget how mortified I felt during the Party Conventions when Bush spoke about issues important to women, while reporting-for-duty Kerry sent his wife to do the job.

Martha Burk rocks. She will be at the upcoming NOW Conference here in Nashville!

The Democrats' Woman Problem:

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.

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.

And lifting “personal freedom and personal responsibility” from the Republican playbook —as Dean is now doing—won’t do any good either. When women get up on Election Day morning, they’ll still think about elephants.