September 15, 2008
Obama has never gone out of his way to relate to women.
Only seven of his top twenty Senate staff positions are filled by women (McCain has thirteen of twenty) and women on Obama’s staff earn 83 cents for each dollar his male staffers are paid. (McCain pays his female staffers $1.04 for each dollar he pays to his men).
From the very first moment Obama entered the presidential race, feminists resented him for trying to stop Hillary from becoming the first woman to be elected president. In the minds of feminists, the fifteenth Amendment (giving blacks the vote) competed with the nineteenth (women’s suffrage) for national attention.
Even though women had to wait more than fifty years longer than African-Americans to get the vote, feminists were in no
mood to let a black man get elected in place of a white woman, especially if her name was Hillary Clinton.
Clearly the Obama/Clinton race triggered ill feelings among many women and laid the basis for the problems Obama was to have in the general election. He won the nomination by beating a woman and then hoped to capitalize on the votes of women to get elected in November. As the race developed, the elbows got sharper and the rhetoric of both sides seemed to emphasize race and gender more and more.
Hillary appealed for the votes of “white working people” while Obama lambasted and ridiculed her defense of guns by calling her “Annie Oakley.”
Although Obama always spoke of Hillary respectfully in public, it was clear to all voters that some ill will had crept into their relationship. After the primaries, Hillary postponed her concession for at least a week as pressure built on her to step aside.
For his part, Obama seemed to snub Hillary, passing up opportunities to meet her and doing little to help her raise funds to pay off her campaign debt.As it became clearer that he was not about to select Hillary for vice-president, the mutual animosity seemed to escalate. Obama made it clear that he would not even consider Hillary for vice president, ostentatiously refusing to vet her or to include her on his short list of candidates.
By early July, even as Obama led McCain in the polls, it was evident that his drawing power among women was dwindling. The downhill progression of that relationship and the steps the Republicans took to hasten its demise, may explain the true turning point of the 2008 election.
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MCCAIN FINESSES OBAMA
Then the McCain campaign pulled off one of the most successful head fakes in modern American politics. Obama had to decide not only whether or not to choose Hillary, but whether to go with another woman, likely Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius.
Had he opted for either woman, the odds are that he would have won the election, but McCain out maneuvered him.
Through leaks and judiciously planted stories, the McCain campaign convinced Obama and his people that the Republicans were going to nominate a man – Romney, Lieberman, or Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty – instead of Sarah Palin who they had, in fact, been eyeing for the job for weeks and weeks before.
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THE DEMOCRATS FALL INTO MCCAIN’S TRAP
But then the Democrats compounded the error by attacking Palin and doing so on personal, gender based issues, no less. It was a gift to the Republicans even their most sophisticated strategists could not have anticipated. And what was the leading charge against Palin? That her daughter was pregnant and not married!
McCain wisely told the media that Sarah had informed him of the situation before he offered her the job and that he said it would make no difference in his decision.
In one stroke, the Democrats undid all the good for themselves they had accomplished in decades of support for welfare, food stamps, day care, rent subsidies, headstart programs, and abortion.
By seeming to suggest that a woman should be disqualified because her daughter was pregnant and unmarried was a slap in the face of the tens of millions of Democratic single women voters upon whom the party depended for its fabled gender gap.
THANK YOU!
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