It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  But both scripts would have dealt with women as a class, not as individuals. Bayless herself didn’t see women that way. She had just told me that she was a Republican because she believed in individual responsibility. She had succeeded in her own struggle because she had taken charge of her life, worked hard, and asked to be judged only on her merits. Now here she was, the second-ranking official in the entire state of Arizona. I could toss her all the softball questions about gender politics that I wanted. Betsey Bayless wouldn’t play.

  When I asked about the GOP’s support for guns, Bayless shrugged. In Arizona, she explained, guns weren’t much of an issue because westerners felt so comfortable with them. “Even women?” I pressed. Bayless smiled. “Women can use guns, too,” she said. When I asked about abortion, Bayless replied that her own position was in the middle. She disliked abortion. But she couldn’t see permitting the government to ban it. “Arizona already has a law that makes partial birth abortions illegal,” Bayless said. “I think that makes sense. I think most women do, too.” Would it help the GOP appeal to women if it dropped the pro-life plank from its platform? “The Republican Party is a great big party,” Bayless replied. “There’s plenty of room for different views.”

  Leaving Bayless’s office, I found myself wondering how I was going to justify the cost of my flight to Phoenix. I had come to the high desert to get a woman’s view of the Republican Party. When I got it, I couldn’t tell it apart from a man’s.

  * * *

  Next I went downstairs to the office of the state treasurer, Carol Springer. Springer is a gal. If Phoenix had been Dodge City, she would have been Miss Kitty. In her early sixties, she has blond hair piled high on her head, high cheekbones, and a look that lets you know that while you’re talking she’s sizing you up.

  Springer moved to Phoenix from Oregon thirty years ago. Shortly thereafter, her husband walked out on her, leaving her to raise their five children. Deciding that it would be easier to keep an eye on her brood in a small town, Springer moved to Prescott, about eighty miles north of Phoenix, where the principal industries were ranching and mining (Prescott has since become a center of high tech). Springer supported her family as a real estate agent. “I raised those children on my own,” Springer, seated at her desk, told me. “I’ve been independent a long time now.”

  In 1990 Springer ran for the Arizona senate. She didn’t want to. The man who already represented Prescott in the senate was a friend. But the economy was, as she put it, “in the pits,” and when the legislature enacted a tax hike, her friend, the Prescott senator, cast the deciding vote. “If you want to help the economy,” Springer said, disgusted, “you don’t raise taxes. That’s just logic.” Springer tried to get someone else to run against her friend. When no one would, she reluctantly decided to announce against him herself. All she wanted to do was send her friend the message that he ought to think twice before voting for any more tax hikes. He refused to take her seriously. “When I called him up to tell him I was running, he just laughed and laughed,” Springer said. That left her with no choice. She had to wage a campaign. “I had no money. I never held a fund-raiser. All I talked about was that one issue, taxes.” Springer won by two hundred out of eighteen thousand votes. “On election night,” she said, “the two most surprised people were my opponent and me.”

  Springer served in the Arizona senate eight years. The GOP controlled the body for six of those years, allowing Springer and her fellow Republicans to win the passage of nearly all the legislation they wanted. They enacted charter school legislation. They reformed the state welfare system. They reformed the entire state budget process. Springer enjoyed the senate just as long as she and her fellow Republicans were getting things done. But when Arizona’s Republicans seemed to lose their sense of initiative—at just about the same time, as it happened, that Republicans in Washington lost theirs—Springer grew impatient. “During the Contract with America time we had real goals. But now it’s like we’re just kind of going along.”

  Bored with the senate, Springer decided to run for state treasurer. She knew she would have less influence over policy than she had in the senate. But in reforming the state budget process she had learned the ins and outs of state finances, and she believed she would enjoy the work.

  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, Gove
rnor 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.

  Journal entry:

  This afternoon, as the plane back to California gained altitude, I found myself looking down on the shimmering skyscrapers and tidy green lawns of Phoenix, a city thrusting out into the desert at the rate of an acre an hour. Real estate, tourism, banking, insurance, technology—below lay all the infinite variety of human activity in a free society. Imagine it, I thought. All of that being overseen by a few tough Republican ladies.

  CALLING KELLYANNE

  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 h
eartless 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.

  POOF! THE GAP VANISHES

  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.