Women Are Ready for Men to Give Up Their Seats

Terri Baas talks excitedly of losing her “political virginity.” She doesn’t know me, but figures I’ll understand. Because I’m a woman, that’s why.

Baas is a business owner, 43 years old, a wife and mother of two kids. She dresses smart, invests wisely, drives a big expensive car. She is no slouch.

It happened, Baas says, in October of last year, during the monthly meeting of Women in Business. She gives me the details without a hint of embarrassment in her voice. She bubbles, she gushes. In the old days, the cynic would ask, “And what does he look like, Terri? Is he cute?”

Except, thank God, those days are going, going, if not quite gone.

Terri Baas says that day in October changed her life for good. Barbara Boxer, the Marin County congresswoman and U.S. Senate candidate, was speaking to Women in Business, and elsewhere, Anita Hill and the gang of good ol’ boys were making big time news.

Boxer is a Democrat, and Baas has always voted GOP. Yet to Baas, such a difference never seemed to matter less.

“Did you know that there are only two women in the Senate?” she asks me now.

I know, I know; sigh and very deep breath. I keep running tabs on the his and hers in the high places of the land. I check out the mastheads, the members of this board and that. It’s become an obsession; it can become depressing.

But not to Baas. She’s been politically born again. And I am meeting more and more of her kind. Suddenly, almost incredibly, politics is becoming exciting again.

“I think that was the thing that really got me, when I heard Barbara Boxer say that,” Baas goes on. “Two women! I had absolutely no idea. Until then, it had never occurred to me that we had a white man’s government. I realized that wasn’t correct and that something should be done about it.”

Baas had called to invite me to a political fund-raiser for Republican Judith Ryan, the former judge who is taking on Bully Bob, a.k.a. Robert K. Dornan, the right-wing fringy congressman who’s been in the House for the past 14 years. He’s the same one who says he bounced a House bank check for God.

In this same House, the her-his tally is 29 to 409. They call this the House of Representatives, but what it really represents to millions of American women is too many guys in suits or golf clothes deciding what’s right for the little women back home, where they belong.

At least they got part of that right. Women candidates today--so far, there are 189 women running for the Senate, the House or a governorship--are largely concentrating on the home front, their traditional expertise.

They are saying that “women’s issues”--read that health care, education, the environment, the right to choose whether to give birth--have been ghettoized for too long. Pricey war toys may be sexier--when we can get them to work--but the fun hasn’t trickled down.

Do people care about such agendas when they can’t get health insurance, when the child-care bill rivals the rent? And how can we compete against the Japanese if we can’t get Johnny to read? If he can’t get a job, will we end up warehousing him in jail?

“We need change and that is why we are running,” Judith Ryan says.

This is a woman, 48 years old, now a private arbitrator, whom many within Orange County’s Republican power circle tried to scare out of her primary run. She’s not flashy, she rarely raises her voice. She is mainline GOP, pro-choice, for the death penalty and a cut in the capital gains tax.

Her experience is in listening, sorting through the chaff, weighing the facts, and then deciding what is just. Women and men are contributing equally to her campaign.

All of which has been enough to make the power boys start with the Tarzan imitations in this bastion of the GOP. First they start pounding their chests, then they go for the screams. From the sound of it, you’d think that they’d just seen a mouse scurry from under their skirts.

“It’s been intimidation from the word go,” says County Clerk Gary Granville, a Ryan supporter who has had political friends offer contributions just under the legal reporting limit because they fear the hysterical Wrath of Bob.

“It’s really been a revelation,” adds Supervisor Harriett Wieder, another Ryan backer. “It’s pathetic . . . . (Local GOP chairman) Tom Fuentes asked me why I was picking on his boy. . . . What they’re doing is not dangerous, it’s stupid. It shows how blatantly arrogant they are.”

In the meantime, Dornan, who hasn’t returned my calls, publicly dismisses Ryan as a liberal, backed by “a national army of radical feminists” who doesn’t know the issues at all. And he calls Ryan’s campaign consultant, Eileen Padberg, who worked for the Bush campaign last time around, “dead meat” on account of having “stabbed me in the back.”

Yet he is scared. Although his campaign motto is “No Apologies,” a recent mailer to potential contributors said Ryan “may be the greatest challenge of my political career.”

This is quite an admission from a man who just filed suit against United Airlines because a stewardess had the audacity to kick him off a plane when he refused to straighten his seat. “I felt like a little waif,” Dornan said.

Oh, and incidentally, Dornan reportedly does believe in term limitations for members of the House. Let’s see, elected in 1976, minus the two years after the Senate loss, that’s 14 years.

Bye-bye, Bob. I’d say your limit is up.