LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Ellen Malcolm : The Woman Behind All Those Women Candidates

There’s no one named Emily behind EMILY’s List. Instead, there is Ellen Malcolm, who coined the phrase “Early money is like yeast” (it makes the dough rise), and took the acronym for the name of the organization she founded in 1985. Her purpose, which she has pursued single-mindedly ever since, was to help Democratic women who support abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment get elected to House, Senate and governors’ offices around the country.

Malcolm, 45, might have chosen a life of ease, after inheriting a fortune from a great-grandfather who was a founding partner in the company that became IBM. Instead, she got involved in politics at the public-interest lobby Common Cause and the National Women’s Political Caucus before joining the Carter White House as a press secretary to the President’s special assistant for Consumer Affairs. It was some years later that she dreamed up what she calls “the best new idea in politics,” an organization to help women get their campaigns off the ground by providing early financial support.

Though it is a registered political-action committee, EMILY’s List doesn’t work like most PACs that support candidates directly, and are subject to federal spending limits. Instead, it functions as a network of like-minded individual donors, advising its members on which candidates to support and funneling their contributions to the races it recommends.

The organization’s first big victory came in 1986, when it raised $350,000 and helped Barbara A. Mikulski become the first Democratic woman elected to the U.S. Senate in her own right. In 1990, EMILY’s List was instrumental in electing Ann Richards governor of Texas, and shares credit for several Senate wins by women this year, including the two in California. In seven years, it has become the nation’s largest funder of federal campaigns.

I met Malcolm the day after the election at her 16th Street office, down the street from the White House. The place was littered with leftover hors d’oeuvres from the previous night’s victory celebration, which didn’t end until 3 a.m. Like the rest of her all-female staff, Malcolm was somewhat exhausted, but very happy about the results. She spent most of her day before the interview accepting thanks from newly elected women who called to say, “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Question: Was it the year of the woman?

Answer: It certainly was. We thought the measure of success was whether we were going to make historic, significant change, and we certainly made history on Tuesday night. It took us 200 years to elect the first Democratic woman to the Senate in her own right, and that’s Barbara Mikulski. Six years later, we had a grand slam: We elected four new Democratic women to the Senate. Sen. Mikulski now has some company.

*

Q: How did you do in the House races?

A: Between 1972 and 1987, the number of Democratic women in the House had actually gone down, from 14 to 12. EMILY’s list started doing House races in 1988. Tuesday night, we elected 21 new Democratic women to the House. In the past three elections we’ve tripled the number from 12 to 36. So we’re seeing some dramatic changes.

*

Q: What was your favorite campaign?

A: Certainly one of my favorites was Carol Moseley Braun, who started this off with her really startling defeat of Alan Dixon in the Illinois primary last spring, and was the first announced winner last night. I thought that was so appropriate. It was a tremendous victory. And, certainly, winning the two California races was a delight. I was so sick and tired of all the conventional wisdom that California would never elect two women as its senators.

*

Q: What was your major disappointment, Lynn Yeakel in Pennsylvania losing to Arlen Specter?

A: Oh, definitely. There was just a tremendous interest in that race from around the country. And it was a real disappointment to many people. But I think we came out of that, and out of the election, with a real sense of women as powerful political players. And I think women are going to be treated with more respect by the Congress as a result of the wins we had. I think even Arlen Specter would agree that you pay a political price if you don’t treat women with respect and you don’t pay attention to their concerns.

*

Q: Some criticized Yeakel for running only on the issue of Anita Hill.

A: Well, it was certainly in Sen. Specter’s interest to paint a picture of Lynn Yeakel as a one-issue candidate. But if you listened to her, and you saw her spots and you heard her in the debates, you couldn’t but realize that she was talking about the need to get the country and Pennsylvania back to work again, and to deal with health care and education. She was well versed in those issues and spoke eloquently about them.

*

Q: What went wrong in Pennsylvania? Did you learn any lessons?

A: I think it is difficult for people--men and women--who have not run for office before to understand the pressures of running in these major races. The women who had not run for office before had a learning curve to learn how to handle the press, the constant barrage of attacks. They had to learn how to raise money--the whole gamut. And the people who were supporting some of the women newcomers had to learn how to put together very complicated, sophisticated campaigns, in the glare of the national spotlight.

*

Q: Is your role just to contribute money, or do you get involved in the logistical and political aspects of these campaigns?

A: We now do a lot of political work for the candidates, as well as raise money for them. We started after our first go-round with House candidates in 1988. We learned a valuable lesson about how it’s virtually impossible to beat incumbents running for reelection, and therefore the only way we were going to be able to elect women to the House was to find open seats. Well, there aren’t very many open seats in a normal election year. In ‘88, we had 27, 29 in ’90. Maybe half of those could be won by a Democrat. We knew that ‘92, because of redistricting, was going to create all these open seats.

So in 1989 we started building a political operation to go out, find out where the open seats were going to be, work with women candidates to get them ready. And the numbers show how important that strategy was. Of the 21 new Democratic women in the House, only three got there by beating an incumbent.

*

Q: How much money did you raise and who did you give it to?

A: We were off the charts in this election. The members of EMILY’s List contributed just about $6.2 million to 36 women running for the House and eight women running for the Senate. We have reinvented political fund raising. We have found a way to get individuals involved and contributing to women’s campaigns. If you’re running for the House, there’s no way you can tell people around the country what your race is about. So we have created a donor base and we use that to support women running around the country. One of my favorite things about this election is that this donor network of individuals is going to contribute more money to House and Senate candidates than all the special-interest PACs.

*

Q: Did some women run this year on a platform of being women? Some people felt the message was: Elect me because I’m female.

A: I never hear the women candidates saying, “You should elect me just because I’m a woman.” I often hear their opponents trying to narrow the women’s support by making that claim. The reality is that women running in the ’92 elections were talking about issues like jobs, health care and the economy, the need to change Congress and getting it to work again. It’s because they were speaking to a broad range of issues that were important to voters that the women candidates were able to win.

*

Q: Did the men who ran against your candidates use sexist tactics?

A: I do object to the misleading ads that misconstrue a candidate’s record or position. I think that’s wrong--it’s wrong for men to do, and for women to do. It’s a serious problem in our political system. But there are some indications that the really heavy negative campaigning was rejected by voters in some of these races. Women are tough campaigners. They certainly know how to withstand attacks. And I think we make a mistake if we say, as some do, that women should play by different rules, or that they are somehow especially vulnerable to the rules of politics. I don’t think that’s true.

*

Q: How do you think these new women will change the Senate?

A: Certainly, we’re beginning to see in the Senate a representative democracy. . . . When you exclude half the population, you’re losing those life experiences and perspectives, to say nothing of the talents of half the country. So we’re beginning to see a change in that. But with six women in the Senate, we have a ways to go.

*

Q: What did the Clarence Thomas hearings mean for your organization?

A: I think the Thomas-Hill hearings tapped the anger of voters in a powerful way. Whether you believed him or believed her, you looked at that Senate Judiciary Committee and said, this is what’s wrong with the Congress. These guys are insensitive, they’re arrogant, they’re out of touch. One of the powerful visual lessons of Thomas-Hill was that there were no women there. For women, that certainly created a firestorm of support for women candidates. But I think a lot of men, too, said, “If we had more women, the place would work better.” For EMILY’s List, it resulted in an explosion of membership and support for candidates. We had 3,000 members before the Thomas-Hill hearings took place. Today we have about 24,000.

*

Q: Are all of your members women?

A: No, about 10% are men. There are a lot of men who think this country would work better if women were in Congress. So it’s not surprising to me that they also want to support women candidates. And we love having their help.

*

Q: Let me ask you about one race that didn’t come out well from your point of view, New York. Why did you support Geraldine Ferraro over Liz Holtzman?

A: We took a long hard look at the New York Senate race, including doing our own poll of primary voters to get a clear understanding of what was happening in that race. We came to two decisions. The first was that if we did not get involved in the race, then neither woman was going to win. Bob Abrams was a strong contender in the primary. The second point was that, at every level of our analysis, Geraldine Ferraro was the stronger candidate. Certainly, the primary proved our decision was correct. It boiled down to a race between Gerry Ferraro and Bob Abrams. Liz Holtzman was never a major factor. Our support of Gerry really helped her fight it out to the end. It was an extremely disappointing result, particularly after the terrible advertising and attacks by Holtzman and Abrams. It was some of the worse campaigning I’ve seen in politics.

*

Q: So sometimes your decision about who to support comes down to an issue of political viability?

A: Yes. We think that to give women the chance to win we have to make some tough decisions about who to support. As we see women progressing more and more in politics, we’re going to have a lot more races where there’s going to be more than one woman. And there are going to be more cases where if we don’t get behind one of the women in the race, and make some tough decisions, none of the women are going to win.

*

Q: What will you look for in the first 100 days of the Clinton Administration?

A: The No. 1 concern we have is who is going to be appointed to run the government. I certainly hope--and expect--that we’re going to see a lot of women in significant positions. . . . I would certainly hope that he would tackle the gag rule immediately and, in the long term, support the Freedom of Choice Act. He has spoken a lot on child support and the Family and Medical Leave Act, and I hope he’ll be supportive of those issues. There were a whole series of issues where we won in the Congress, and the legislation was vetoed by George Bush. I would also like to see the cap come off damages in sex-discrimination cases.

*

Q: What do you think of the pro-choice women who have tried to change the Republican Party? Is that a hopeless battle?

A: No, I don’t at all. I was encouraged that a group of women wanted to start WISH List, which works like EMILY’s List, only it supports pro-choice Republican women. It was started by one of our members, and I was happy to tell her how we did it and encourage her. The Republican Party needs to take a serious look at what it has become. It is now controlled by the far right, arch-conservative forces. If they want to win the White House, and keep winning elections, they need to broaden that base, to bring in moderate Republicans, pro-choice Republicans.

*

Q: What happens when the Senate has 51 women. Do you fold up shop?

A: I want to have one heck of a party.