Schundler has even addressed Jersey City’s spiritual life. Originally pro-choice, after taking office Schundler became pro-life. “I used to believe that fetuses weren’t human because we’d all feel worse if we were actually taking human lives. Then a friend said, ‘People had a way of defining away the humanity of African-Americans during the Civil War. Feelings are cultural constructs. You shouldn’t let them be a guide to what is moral or not.’ ” While Schundler was thinking over the best way to express his new pro-life conviction, the sanitation department found a dead baby in the sewage system. “You’d be surprised how many bodies turn up in a city like this,” Schundler said. “Lots of times, no one can identify them.” In a public ceremony, Schundler joined the city’s ministers, priests, rabbis, and Islamic clerics in dedicating a memorial to all those in Jersey City who die forgotten or unknown.
How has Schundler compiled such a remarkable list of achievements? The answer is simple. He saw what needed to be done—really, when you listen to him, you come to believe that all it took was a man of goodwill with a decent head on his shoulders—and he did it. Of course, he had to win approval for each of his initiatives from his city council. But that never proved much of an obstacle. He was the mayor. The city council expected him to lead. How different is the life of a Republican who finds himself as an executive from the life of a Republican who finds himself merely one of the 435 members of the House of Representatives.
I asked Schundler what he would do after stepping down as mayor. It had crossed my mind that he might run for the House. “I’m planning on running for governor of New Jersey in 2001,” Schundler replied. Governor. An executive position, not a legislative one. Of course.
* * *
Washington, D.C., and Jersey City, New Jersey. In one city, a couple of hundred Republican legislators list haplessly along, frustrated and anxious, unable to see what difference their careers might be making to anyone. No doubt they have prevented the Clinton administration from raising taxes and making the government bigger. But it is difficult to feel much sense of accomplishment when your principal achievement is keeping the government gridlocked. In the other city, a Republican mayor, self-confident and energetic, enacts one initiative after another, producing palpable improvements in the lives of virtually every citizen in his city. It is worth noting that while Washington has a press corps of thousands, Jersey City has a press corps of none (to the extent that coverage of Mayor Schundler appears anywhere, it appears in the Trenton Times). The ramifications of this disparity in press coverage are obvious—and, for the GOP, baleful. Republicans in Congress affect the way Americans see the GOP far more than Mayor Schundler—or any mayor or governor, since the coverage such figures receive is nearly always limited to their own cities and states—ever can.
The next time you turn on the television and see a House Republican looking bewildered or grim or forlorn, force yourself to remember this: Somewhere in America there is a Republican governor or mayor who is smiling.
Chapter Seven
THE PRICKLY LADIES OF
THE CACTUS STATE,
OR WOMEN
Journal entry:
I still don’t know why Edita had to get so testy about it. I was only conducting a mental experiment. The trouble is, the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became. If women had never been given the vote, just how different would the country look?
The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which in 1920 gave women the vote, was one of four amendments enacted during the second decade of the twentieth century. The other three proved dubious. The Sixteenth Amendment, enacted in 1913, gave the federal government the right to levy income taxes. The government quickly used that right to gain control over the entire economy. The Seventeenth Amendment, also enacted in 1913, denied state legislatures the right to elect United States senators, mandating the popular election of senators instead. The amendment thereby undermined states’ rights. The Eighteenth Amendment, enacted in 1919, decreed prohibition. Prohibition? Enough said.
“Maybe the Nineteenth Amendment was just part of a bad streak,” I said to Edita. “I mean, it’s not as if giving women the vote was inevitable. In Switzerland, one canton denied women the vote until 1989, another until 1991. The cantons only gave in when the rest of Switzerland decided to make a stink about it.
“Imagine it,” I continued. “An America run entirely by guys. Lower taxes. Complete laissez-faire for business. Just about the only government items would be bond issues to build sports stadiums.”
Edita looked at me. “I’m giving you one chance to tell me you’re not serious,” she said.
“I wasn’t serious at first. Now I’m not so sure.”
She stood.
“You don’t have to get offended,” I said. “Where’s your sense of humor, anyway?”
She walked out of the room.
“Hey!” I called after her. “Who’s making dinner?”
When I mentioned the gender gap to Newt Gingrich, his temper flared. “If Republicans get the votes of fewer women than men, then it’s a simple mathematical fact that Democrats get the votes of fewer men than women. Why doesn’t the press ask the Democrats about their gender gap?” he said.
Gingrich had a point. Yet whether or not the press harps on the Democratic gender gap, the Republican gender gap still exists. Indeed, it existed for twenty years before the press began to write about it during President Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. Studies indicate that with one exception, the election of 1976, when Gerald Ford won 49 percent of the votes of both genders, the Republican candidate has won the votes of fewer women than men in each of the nine presidential elections since 1964. In six of the nine, the elections of 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996, the Republican candidate received only nine or fewer votes from women for every ten votes he received from men. In at least one election (the election of 1996) the gender gap cost the GOP the White House: If Bob Dole had received the same proportion of the women’s vote that he received of the men’s vote, he would have become president. Bob Dole as president. Now there’s a thought to cheer you.
I set out to learn what caused the gender gap. Once I had the answer to that question, I reasoned, I’d be able to figure out how Republicans could close it. This leg of my journey across the Republican landscape proved less straightforward than I expected.
* * *
“I call them YDWs,” Jack told me. “Young dumb women.”
Jack is a political consultant. He has devoted himself to getting Republicans elected to state legislatures. Part of the reason is that Jack likes the challenge. The other part is that so few other GOP political consultants care to compete with him for the business. As a general rule, the higher the office, the easier it has proven for Republicans to win. If you think of holding office as eating a pie, then since the Second World War the GOP has eaten about half the presidential pie, about three sevenths of the gubernatorial pie, and about two fifths of the congressional pie. But it has eaten only slivers of the state legislative pie. Even today, when the GOP controls both houses of Congress and occupies thirty of the fifty governors’ mansions, it controls only thirty-two of the nation’s ninety-nine state legislative chambers (each of the fifty states has two legislative chambers except Nebraska, which has only one). Since so many of his own clients end up losing, Jack has become an expert on the forces that defeat Republicans. The gender gap is one of them. Jack’s explanation for the gender gap is elegant in its sweeping simplicity: There are a lot of women out there who actually believe what they see on Oprah.
Jack eyed my tape recorder. “You’ve got to be careful how you use what I tell you,” Jack said. “I mean, it’s all true. YDWs vote against us all the time. But talking about it could get me in trouble. Political correctness and all.” It was then that I decided to write about him under the name of “Jack” instead of his real name.
Why are there only YDWs, young dumb women, and no YDMs, young dumb men? “Men are skeptical,” Jack
explained. “Women aren’t.” Men are taught to figure things out for themselves from an early age. Women are taught to be passive. They’ll permit others to figure things out for them.
“Why won’t a man stop to ask for directions?” Jack asked. “Because he’s a man. He’s supposed to find his way on his own. But women? If that’s the way a complete stranger tells them to go, they’ll drive a hundred miles in the wrong direction and then go over a cliff.”
Just as they permit themselves to be told where to drive, YDWs permit themselves to be told what politics to adopt. No one comes right out and tells them to vote Democratic in so many words. The message that YDWs receive is much more subtle than that. But it amounts to the same thing. “We’re talking about women who want a little glamour in their lives,” Jack said. YDWs thus seek to emulate the people they see on television and in magazines. They copy their hairstyles. They imitate their wardrobes. And they conform to their politics. “Oprah doesn’t go strutting her politics around on her TV show,” Jack said. “But everybody knows without having to be told that Oprah’s no Republican. Next time you go to the grocery store, look at the magazines for sale at the checkout counter. The whole YDW culture is right there.”
Jack is a political professional. If he said a lot of women were YDWs, I supposed, then maybe they were. And my next trip to the grocery store seemed to bear him out. While the cashier rang up my purchases, I picked up a copy of People. My eye fell on “Cause Celebs,” a story about Hollywood stars who had visited Washington to lobby Congress. Ted Danson wanted new laws to protect beaches. Anthony Edwards was seeking more money for research on autism, David Hyde-Pierce for research on Alzheimer’s. Andie MacDowell intended to block the construction of a pipeline in Montana. I closed my eyes, trying to see stars lobbying for conservative causes. Andie MacDowell pushing for tax cuts? Ted Danson seeking tort reform? To state the case is to declare its absurdity. If Jack wanted to contend that the pop culture of which People is a part serves as a transmission belt, conveying liberal politics from Hollywood to American women, then I couldn’t gainsay him.
But Jack’s explanation of the gender gap still bothered me. If women were as dumb as he argued, then giving them the vote had been a mistake. Yet back in 1920, it had been Republicans who pushed the Nineteenth Amendment through the Senate. Had the GOP been right to free the slaves but wrong to enfranchise women?
THE PRICKLY LADIES OF THE CACTUS STATE
Not long after speaking with Jack, I happened to hear a speech by Senator John McCain. In passing, McCain claimed that most of the top positions in the government of Arizona, his home state, were held by Republican women. I looked into it. McCain was right. Of the five offices in Arizona that are filled by statewide elections—governor, secretary of state, treasurer, attorney general, and superintendent of schools—all five are held by women, while the senior-most position in the legislature, president of the senate, is held by a woman, too. Of the six, only one, the attorney general, is a Democrat. The rest are all Republicans.
I flew to Phoenix. I felt sure the women who run Arizona had the gender gap all figured out.
* * *
Betsey Bayless, the first of the four Republican women with whom I spoke, is the Arizona secretary of state. As such, she is responsible for conducting elections, registering trade names and trademarks, and other administrative tasks. Arizona secretary of state isn’t a position people grow up burning with ambition to hold—I myself had to check her Web site to find out what she did—but Bayless oversees a budget of $6 million and a staff of thirty-six. And since Arizona lacks a lieutenant governor, she is next in line to the governor. This amounts to more than a constitutional nicety. In recent years scandals have forced two men to vacate the office of governor, which was then filled by two different secretaries of state, in both cases, as it happened, a woman.
Bayless, in her mid-fifties, is attractive and poised. We sat at a table in her office on the seventh floor of the executive building, immediately behind the state capitol. Her window looked north toward the glass towers of downtown Phoenix, showing skyscrapers glinting in the sun. Bayless had her secretary bring us each a cup of coffee. Then we began talking about how Bayless got where she was.
Bayless knew from an early age that she wanted to work for a living, she explained. When she graduated from the University of Tucson in 1964 with a degree in international banking, she was determined to get a job with one of Arizona’s banks, which were doing more and more business with Latin America. She pictured herself drumming up business, devising new ways of financing international trade, doing deals. Then she interviewed at every bank of any size in the entire state. The best offer she got was for a job overseeing file clerks. She gritted her teeth and took it. Although her duties bored her, Bayless performed them well, deciding that sooner or later her diligence would be rewarded with a job in banking, not filing. Then one day her supervisor took her aside. Her diligence had indeed been noticed—but it was going to be rewarded with candid advice, not a promotion. The supervisor told Bayless that because she was a woman, she would never be able to escape the clerical department no matter how hard she worked. “You’re too talented,” he told her. “Leave. Leave or you’ll be stuck here your entire career.”
“At that point I did a review of the working world,” Bayless said. She surveyed one industry after another—retail, insurance, real estate. In none did women hold responsible positions. Then she looked into state government. There women had risen into management. The explanation? “The top male graduates weren’t seeking government work,” Bayless said. “They all ran off to real estate and banking, where the action was.”
Bayless went back to school, earned a degree in public policy, then got a job with the state and began working her way up. Over the years she compiled a remarkable series of firsts. She became the first woman to head a state agency, the first woman to sit in a governor’s cabinet, and the first woman to chair a governor’s cabinet. In 1987, Bayless left the state government to become a banker, finally realizing her original ambition. Then, in 1989, when a vacancy occurred on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Bayless was appointed to fill it. The job proved a big one—Maricopa County, in which Phoenix is located, contains almost 60 percent of the population of the state. So in 1997, when Governor Jane Dee Hull offered to appoint Bayless to complete Hull’s own unexpired term as Arizona secretary of state—Hull was one of the secretaries of state who became governor when her predecessor as governor resigned—Bayless felt qualified to accept. In 1998 Bayless was elected to a term as Arizona secretary of state in her own right.
I noticed an odd aspect of Bayless’s tale. Although she had been a Republican all her life, for much of her career her fellow Republicans hadn’t helped her. If anything they had stood in her way. A Democratic governor, Bruce Babbitt, had given Bayless her biggest promotions, naming her to head the Department of Public Administration, then inviting her to chair his cabinet. Then a Republican governor, Evan Mecham, who would become famous for rescinding Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a state holiday, refused to appoint Bayless to a senior position in his administration. “He also made it pretty clear he didn’t think much of women in responsible positions in the first place,” Bayless said. It was after Mecham became governor that Bayless left state government.
After treatment like that, why had Bayless even remained a Republican? Bayless smiled knowingly. It was clearly a question to which she had given some thought. “Believe me,” she said, “my political life would have been a lot easier if I had been a Democrat, and I was given lots of chances to change parties and become one. But I just couldn’t leave the Republican Party. I believe in people taking responsibility for their own lives.”
Now that Bayless had told me her story, it was time to raise the subject of gender politics. I tossed her a softball of a question, inquiring about the 1998 election in which Bay-less and the other women now running Arizona had been elected. How had this triumph for women come about? In
stead of taking a swing at the question, Bayless let it land with a thud.
“All of the women were known commodities,” she replied flatly. “They’d all had a lot of experience. It wasn’t all that surprising they were elected.”
That was it. I tried again, pitching Bayless another easy one. Of course the candidates had a lot of experience, I said. But a band of sisters had grasped hands, then burst through the glass ceiling. Didn’t she see that as a remarkable accomplishment?
Bayless let this question, too, land with a thud. “The gender thing was remarked on after the election,” she said. “Before the election, it wasn’t. It wasn’t a factor. Not to the voters—and not to us.”
Without thinking about it, I realized, I had taken it for granted that Bayless would follow one of two scripts. In the first script, she would have championed the GOP as a vehicle for women’s progress. “It’s no accident that nearly all the women elected in 1998 were Republicans,” Bayless would have said. “The GOP is breaking down barriers for women at every level. Republican women are on the march.” In the second script, Bayless would have given vent to feminist frustrations with the GOP. “The way the Republican Party has treated women is outrageous,” Bayless would have said. “The GOP should drop the pro-life plank from its platform. It should drop its support for guns. It should embrace affirmative action for women. And now that I’m a high official, I intend to do all I can to see that the GOP does just that.”
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