Clinton Needs to Widen the Gender Gap : The president should appropriate ‘family values’ rhetoric but not GOP themes.

It’s no secret that President Clinton has female problems. And I don’t mean the “bimbo eruptions” that nearly derailed his 1992 campaign or the bipartisan crusade to crucify the first lady. I’m talking about the gender gap, which the president needs to widen as much as he needs to win California’s electoral votes.

Exit polls in the presidential primaries revealed that a higher proportion of men who expressed anger over government spending have switched to Republican candidates and a greater percentage of women worried about their families’ economic futures are casting their votes for Democrats. To win in November, Clinton must strengthen that gender gap. That the Republican Party badly fractured over abortion is his good fortune. In 1992, 30% of Republican women crossed party lines to elect Clinton. A similar exodus might occur in 1996 if the GOP keeps its antiabortion plank and if Clinton can demonstrate that he understands what ordinary working women want.

Who are these women? They are not the doctors, lawyers, investment bankers or corporate managers who fret over the glass ceiling. Nor are they the welfare mothers or service workers whose greatest problem is the sticky floor from which they cannot arise. This silent majority of women whose lives are rarely publicized includes teachers, civil servants, nurses, farmers, administrators and office workers. Their salaries ensure that their families survive. Perhaps they own homes. They juggle family and work, never sleep enough and use their savings for family vacations. But these are women who are likely to vote for Clinton, if he woos them properly.

Ever since 1980, when the gender gap first appeared, political analysts have observed that what these women most desire is a “family friendly” society, one that respects family responsibilities as much as those attached to the workplace. But what would such a society look like? Recently, I spoke at a luncheon sponsored by several women’s groups, including the Business and Professional Women’s Club, in a rural town in Northern California. These were neither card-carrying feminists nor highly paid career women. They were typical of the working women Clinton must address.

I asked them to imagine what kind of society would genuinely honor “family values.” As polls have consistently suggested, women--still the primary care givers of the young and the elderly--are more inclined than men to feel that they require assistance in carrying out the competing responsibilities for which they are held responsible. Hands quickly shot up in the air. Here are some of their ideas:

% After-school activities for children and teens.

% Tax deductions equal to the cost of child care expenses.

% Universal health care.

% Government-regulated and subsidized care for the elderly.

% Support for the president’s national youth program.

% A higher minimum wage.

% Government loans and tax deductions for college education.

% Government regulations on downsizing and outsourcing.

% Retraining of laid-off workers.

% Money for schools, not for prisons.

% Flexible working hours, more telecommuting and on-site child care at work.

Skeptics might ask how this is to be funded. These women had answers: End corporate welfare, stop unnecessary farm subsidies and reduce our defense budget.

In 1992, Clinton targeted the economy as his central campaign message. But a strong and competitive economy, while important, doesn’t strengthen the country unless it provides jobs, retrains workers and protects families. Taxpayers now contribute $1.1 million a year to promote overseas awareness of Campbell’s V-8 juice and $2.6 million annually to enhance the product promotion of Gallo wines under an Agriculture Department program. No one can calculate the billions that we squander on yet another Seawolf submarine (to fight Iraq?) or more B2 bombers (to pulverize Russia?). Imagine the windfall (once called the peace dividend) if politicians acted as though families mattered.

To widen the gender gap, Clinton needs to appropriate the language of “family values” and reinvest it with concrete solutions that matter to working women. He needs to strip “family values” of its 1950s image, its homage to patriarchal authority, its xenophobic and racist baggage and its homophobic hatred. In short, the president needs not only to court women, but also to listen to them. Someone should slip the president a new campaign message: “It’s the family, stupid.”