Bush Scares Up a Women’s Issue, but Just One of the Many

George Bush is the first person to win the presidency by campaigning on a women’s issue.

Excuse me, you are saying, on a women’s issue? You thought those early visits to day-care centers had been all photo opportunities and no payoff, that backing for the Equal Rights Amendment hadn’t even made it into the 1988 Republican platform. You thought that Michael S. Dukakis, not George Bush, would have been way ahead on women’s issues if he had done anything at all to galvanize that constituency. After all, the gender gap usually favors Democrats.

But consider this: Willie Horton was a women’s issue. That issue is fear. Fear of being raped. Fear that your children will be killed or kidnaped. Fear that your husband will be mugged on the front walk or your mother robbed of her cherished heirlooms. Bush’s use of the crime issue may have been intended to overcome his own wimp factor or to push up Dukakis’s negative ratings. But it also had the effect of playing on all those fears as women saw those convicts going through the revolving door, heading out of prison onto their streets and presumably into their homes.

Not all women are confident Cagneys and Laceys. Not all women are the new television star Roseanne, with whom a mugger would mess at his own peril. Not all women can rebound from a beating or the loss of a loved one. Bush’s people--and the committees his people took their sweet time about disavowing--played on that vulnerability. Yes, they used a women’s issue all right; they used it negatively, and they used it very effectively.

Meantime, on the other side of the gender gap, Dukakis didn’t use women’s issues one way or the other. Not only did Dukakis not react quickly enough when the furlough issue surfaced, he never got any positive message across to women voters who had a lot at stake in this election.

Item: Women work. And they don’t earn enough from their hard work. As Joanne Howes, head of the Women’s Vote Project, and Irene Natividad, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus, put it in a recent article: “Women voters have been absorbed into the fastest growing part of the economy, often resulting in bad jobs for bad wages. . . . Two-thirds of the women in the labor force with preschool children are either the family’s only wage earner orare contributing to a family income of $15,000 or less.”

Here is the issue with which Dukakis could have appealed to hundreds of thousands of American women, but you would not know it had you only been watching his campaign. When will campaign planners stop reading academicians’ position papers and get out to talk with working mothers? When will they take their candidate out of a tank and put him in a living room with women who might have worked for him and voted for him if he had talked to them?

Item: Women still have primary child-care responsibility. They also know that it’s hard to find day care that is reasonably priced and provides reasonable safety. Yet when Congress was considering a major new program that would have increased the supply of day care, improved its quality and helped people pay for it, where was Dukakis? Letters of support aren’t enough; personal lobbying, or even a campaign commercial, would have shown commitment and might even have dramatized the bill enough to help get it passed.

Item: Women today can get legal abortions. That choice could be severely restricted by a more conservative Supreme Court. The new President could well appoint several new justices. Columnist George Will saw this as an issue that Dukakis should be exploiting. Kate Michelman of the National Abortion Rights Action League saw it as an issue that should be discussed, and she went on the road for six weeks, spelling it out at forums around the country. Michael Dukakis did none of the above.

Four years ago, Walter F. Mondale was blasted for bowing to so-called “special interests.” To me, that meant he listened to what people cared about; that seemed very “special.” But he lost, and Dukakis and the Democrats seemed determined to avoid women’s issues (and issues of concern to black people and poor people). They did. That didn’t work, either.

As the Democrats sort themselves out yet again, they must remember that millions more women than men vote in each election. They are as concerned as the men who vote about reducing the possibilities of nuclear war. But they have demonstrated clearly in recent U.S. Senate elections that they also will vote for the candidate who speaks to them about issues close to home in direct, clear language. Bush was the only one who did that this time. Sadly, it was the language of fear. Surely there is a candidate out there who can do better. We’re waiting.