WOMEN FOR CLINTON

It's the most commented upon aspect of his campaign so far. James Srodes explains it

Washington LISA BERGER, a respected author on mental health topics, turned to a self-dep- recating joke to explain why, despite her lifelong attachment to the Republican Party, she was voting a second time for Bill Clinton.

'Bob Dole is my father's generation, so who needs that? And Bill Clinton? Well, every woman I know has had at least one Bill Clinton in her life. We know he's a rat, but he is still kinda cute.'

A dismissive quip, to be sure. But it is one piece of the much reported paradox which concludes that an overwhelming number of American women will push past the President's 'character' liabilities (including the still simmering Dick Morris scandal) to vote for him a second time.

The numbers are staggering and appear firmly set. As many as two women out of every three who are active voters seem to be prepared to vote for Clinton rather than Bob Dole. And since the active American electorate is 52 per cent women to 48 per cent men, this is an astonishing head start for an administration riven by internal conflicts, an indifferent four-year record, and a lack of clear direction on either foreign or domestic policy issues. Some simple calculations show how far behind the Dole-Kemp ticket is, less than six weeks before election day (5 Novem- ber). Assume the 1996 turnout is the aver- age of the two previous presidential votes, or about 95.8 million voters. If the sum- mer-long gap between the candidates as forecast by the big newspaper polling groups holds true (a questionable assump- tion), Clinton can look to receive 48,884,000 votes, or 51 per cent; Dole will get 36,423,000, or 38 per cent; and Ross Perot and the rest of the field will pull 10,543,000, or the remaining 11 per cent.

There is evidence that the Clinton-Dole gap is narrowing in these final days, as rea- sonably might be expected. Depending on which poll one reads, Clinton's lead is somewhere between 6 and 8 per cent, while Perot's following has dropped below 5 per cent. But the percentage of Clinton's lead that erodes and goes to Dole probably will be offset by disaffected Perot voters returning to their traditional working-class Democratic roots.

The point is that if Bob Dole and Jack Kemp have any hope of overtaking the President, an enormous erosion in Clin- ton's lead must come out of the two-to- one bulge he enjoys among women voters. Perhaps as many as 32.8 million women stand ready to return the Democrats to the White House and (there are straws pointing in the wind) to take back the House of Representatives, if not the Sen- ate, from the control of Newt Gingrich. Worse, for Bob Dole, there appears lit- tle he or the Republicans can do about it. While some women undoubtedly find a catnip quality in the President's raffish sex- uality, the gender gap between them that divides Democrat and Republican voters is very much to do with the issues that divide men and women. Or at least to do with the perception of those issues, which is pretty much the same thing in an era of virtual reality politics.

It was not always this way. Forty years ago American women were attracted to the Republican image of upper-middle-class respectability; men gravitated to the Democrats who were more associated with the labor unions and more working-class. More women than men voted for President Eisenhower; as late as 1960, more women voted for Richard Nixon than for John F. Kennedy.

Jody Newman, former director of the activist National Women's Political Caucus, now a congressional adviser, observes that 'there was a gender gap in the 50s and 60s in the other direction. The current gap began to be discussed in 1980 when women started voting noticeably more Democratic. Women's groups coined the phrase and started talking about it and promoting it to the press as a way of promoting Democrat- ic candidates.'

But Newman argues that there is another trend which is often overlooked. Since the 1980s, American women have shifted from civic club activities to involvement in elective politics. Not only are there more women in the electorate, they have slightly higher turnout rates [at the polls] than do men'.

This offers an insight for observers baf- fled by the recent drift by the United States from an active world leadership role since the disintegration of the Soviet Union nearly a decade ago. American men are still more internationalist in their poli- tics, more pro-military, more opposed to the expansion of government, more fearful of Washington's efforts to enforce social equality in the workplace. Men respond to Bob Dole's promises of big tax reductions and tough government budget cuts; women turn away from such promises.

Not by chance, the issues that generate enthusiasm among women turn out to be the core of the Clinton campaign. Accord- ing to diverse polls such as the periodic surveys of Michigan State University and the bipartisan Robert Teeter and Peter Hart group, younger women are greatly moved by issues that affect their children. They are most concerned by violence in schools and the deterioration of local school performance. Older women worry about health issues and the threat to their pension security posed by the impending bankruptcy of the retirement pensions scheme. While women tend to agree with men that the federal government wastes money and that most politicians are uncar- ing and corrupt, far more women than men put their trust in Washington — and in Bill Clinton— to come up with the solu- tions for reform.

Is this because women and Clinton share a Venusian compassion, where pain is shared and villages are constructed to care for children? Women's activist Newman thinks not. 'Differences [between men and women] on the role of government probably have more to do with the fact that women's lives are more tied to seeing the results of what government produces. In other words, both men and women say that they want to balance the budget and would like lower taxes, and they don't want big gov- ernment interfering in their lives. But women probably are nearer to seeing the effects of spending on education, for example. They are the ones who are more likely to be involved with their children's schools. ... They are more likely to be taking care of their parents and seeing the effect of cuts in Medicare. So government isn't just about paying taxes, it is also about seeing the results of those services.'

There are women who dismiss Mr Clin- ton's promise `to build a bridge for our families to the 21st century'. Women who are university graduates, especially older women, break ranks with their sisters when questioned about Clinton's moral fitness to be in the White House. Joining them are less educated sisters who describe themselves to pollsters as 'regular church-goers', are firmly opposed to both Clinton in particular and the Democrats in general because of a laxity on issues such as drug control, gay rights and, fundamen- tally, the abortion rights issue.

But here again, the ability of Clinton to position himself in the way of fortune turns out to be uncanny, while Dole's inability to evade the loonies camped on his own Right on the abortion issue appear doom-making.

Despite the tragic violence and mad- dened rhetoric of the 'Right to Life' forces, only a tiny fraction of Americans — somewhere between 7 and 10 per cent — believe that abortions should be illegal in the United States, regardless of circum- stances. By and large, men and women agree that the prevalent use of abortion as a birth-control convenience is bad public policy. But when questioned on whether government should intervene, 57 per cent of women and 53 per cent of men thought the decision whether to have the operation should be left to the individual and her doctor.

The oddity is that it appears to be among the very educated women, who deride Bill Clinton as a moral leader and for his per- sonal sleaziness, that abortion assumes a larger importance in the public debate. Among women with more than high-school qualifications — those who are striving in careers in business, education, communica- tions and other professions — the Presi- dent is seen as more supportive of their efforts to crack through the 'glass ceiling' of discrimination and limitation imposed by the hierarchy of men.

The fight over abortion rights, then, has become the symbol of women's efforts to shake free of what they see as control of their lives by men — their husbands and their bosses. 'Get Your Laws Off My Body', the feminist bumper-stickers shriek. One might as well substitute the word `career' for 'body'.

This helps to explain why, when the Republican Governor Pete Wilson of Cali- fornia last year imposed a diminution of affirmative action programmes for the state's university selection, he was taken aback by the opposition, not only from leaders of black and Hispanic pressure groups but from leading women's rights protest groups too.

Dole merely worsened his gender prob- lems when he promised that one of his first acts in the White House would be to rescind many of the government's minority equality regulations. Historians of the 1992 election agree that nothing hurt George Bush's reputation as a resolute man of con- victions more than his cowardly decision to drop his lifelong membership of a family planning group, to hedge on the abortion issue and to begin making a noise about the evils of affirmative action. It cost him a huge swing of votes of women who were activists within the Republican Party.

Nor can Dole make any sudden gestures to reclaim his lost ground among women lest he further enrage hard rightists like Pat Buchanan and the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed. By publicly deriding the anti- abortion policy which these activists imposed on his party's platform, Dole has provoked them to lessen their campaign efforts in his behalf without reaping the expected reward of a grateful American female electorate. They just aren't having any paternalism today, thank you. What it all adds up to is that American women look at Bill Clinton and like what they see. Character and all.