Election Offers a New ‘Showdown at Gender Gap’

The full explanation of why women, in such droves, plan to support the reelection of the first U.S. president alleged (in his previous position) to have sexually harassed a female worker is probably best left to Oprah and the shrinks. But this is just one fascinating nuance of why November’s presidential election promises to be another episode in the continuing late-20th-century mega-series “Showdown at Gender Gap.” Here are the opening-round gender ratings: President Bill Clinton, heavily favored among women, relatively distrusted by men, leads by 15-20 points overall. GOP challenger Bob Dole, true to conservatism’s current electoral profile, does better with men--but trails slightly among them, too. Presumed Reform Party nominee Ross Perot also does better with men; feisty populists generally do--a major reason GOP strategists hope Perot won’t run. They can’t afford to split the AWM (angry white male) vote while Clinton sweeps the SHFs (soft-hearted females).

All right, nobody really uses this terminology--at least not yet. But it’s as good a way as any to approach this era’s presidential election, given gender’s emerging political importance during the last decade and a half.

Consider: Ronald Reagan won his two elections, 1980 and 1984, with majorities weighted toward men. Not for nothing was the former California governor a strong, self-assured former star of Westerns and the TV series “Death Valley Days.” In addition, the issues he emphasized included rebuilding U.S. defense, cracking down on crime and toughening U.S. foreign policy after the feckless Jimmy Carter--who was un-macho enough to say he had been attacked by a “killer rabbit.” True, Reagan put women off a bit by his jokes about “welfare queens” and cutting social programs, but they sensed he was more talk than action. Overall, the problems in the United States from the late 1970s through late ‘80s focused on male-dominated issues. Men favored GOP presidents while women were closely divided.

George Bush proved the point. Despite the joke that he reminded every divorcee of her first husband, he broke even among women in 1988 and carried the male vote easily against Democrat Michael S. Dukakis. Though Dukakis was never attacked by a rabbit, the Massachusetts governor displayed his own reverse macho by fumbling a question from a TV interviewer on whether he’d be willing to execute someone who had raped his wife. Four years later, however, Bush himself faced ambush at Gender Gap.

In 1992, swing female voters thought Bush was phony on abortion, insensitive to the recession and revealingly unskilled with respect to supermarket check-out counters. They opted for Clinton. Men, in turn, thought Bush wimped out on taxes and bungled the Gulf War by letting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein survive. Cars in employment-devastated New Hampshire sported cynical bumper stickers saying, “Saddam Hussein Still Has His Job: How About You?” Many disgusted male Republicans switched to Perot, who talked about fixing problems “by getting under the hood” and could strut sitting down.

This year, of course, gender gap is again shaping up as a major battleground. Clinton now enjoys huge (20-25 point) leads among women in most polls. No previous president has been able to build anything like it--though John F. Kennedy might have in 1964. The obvious keys to Clinton’s appeal are: his belated, but effective willingness to veto the GOP’s 1995 budgetary attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, education and other safety-net programs; and his willingness to veto GOP efforts to restrict or even prohibit women’s rights to have an abortion. Thus, though women are aware of Clinton’s questionable personal behavior toward their sex--Gennifer Flowers and Paula Corbin Jones, his harassment accuser, have at least that threshold credibility--they prefer to think in terms of his larger public-policy morality.

That’s the high falutin’ explanation, at least. What also seems arguable is that Clinton, a.k.a. the Ozark Casanova, seems to have a way with females that transcends public-policy explanations. Kennedy seemed to have the same quality. Whatever it is, musk or middle-of-the-road macho, it’s probably a significant factor in the 1996 women’s vote.

It’s arguably also a factor in men’s negativism toward Clinton as a draft-dodgin’, fast-talkin’ slickster who gets the girls while the other guys get PFC stripes and dead-end jobs. That’s not very statisticizable, either, of course.

For now, Clinton commands the women’s vote by almost two-to-one, while Dole is even slightly behind among men. That’s a recipe for GOP disaster--just as the early Reagan-era version of “Showdown at Gender Gap” was a scenario for liberal disaster. In the early 1980s, the gender gap favored men and conservatives because the salience of male-tilted issues--crime-busting, military preparedness and tough foreign policy--worked to make men 8-15 points more combative and conservative, while women were split roughly equally. Today, a new group of female-tilting issues--retention of the government safety net, the feminization of low economic status and pro-choice sentiment on abortion--have women 15-25 points “softer,” while men are closely divided.

Dole, however, isn’t powerless on these issues. By divorcing himself from the harsh record of the GOP Congress and the periodic males-are-stronger statements of Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), he can recapture some of the Old Dole. That Dole opposed trashing the safety net--his grandparents were on welfare in Depression-era Kansas--and once wondered to reporters why there weren’t political action committees for poor people as well as rich. Moreover, Dole, who spent three years in the late 1940s in the hospital, ought to be able to talk at least as convincingly about the importance of the safety net as Clinton.

Where Dole may be making a gender-gap error, though, is in displaying his war disability in a male-focused appeal as: a symbol of toughness and achievement; and an implied comparison with Clinton’s draft avoidance. Men are already more pro-Dole than the overall population, and besides, the senator is talking about a war and wounds already a half century old. Previous military heroes and generals who ran for president, with one exception, were fewer than 15-20 years from the war they spoke of. But because Dole was wounded 51 years ago, he may just be reminding voters of his age. Handled differently, however, it might work to get Dole back on the popular--and disproportionately feminine--side of safety-net politics. As for abortion, in the end, the retiring Kansas senator is probably going to have to stick with the GOP right-to-life platform and lose female swing voters in the bargain.

Clinton himself still has a few loose threads in his lopsided women’s support. Should Bosnia flame into a war while U.S. troops are there, women might well react more negatively than men. And it’s possible that, if discussion heats up again, Clinton’s personal behavior, which has contributed to several lawsuits and scandals, could turn off upper-income and professional women--in particular, moderate GOP women angered by their party’s abortion position.

Ironically, back in the 1940s and 1950s, women, overall, were slightly more cautious--and thus conservative--than men. The latter were more willing to support Democratic presidents in going to war overseas or in Truman-style Wall Street-bashing. Only since the 1960s has conservatism become the belligerent ideology and thereby emerged as disproportionately male in its support patterns.

Recently, however, the male-flavored positions that generally favored the GOP since 1968 have assumed more extreme, almost caricature-like, dimensions--principally through the antics of the 104th Congress, notably the House. For this year, at least, the reaction against Congress seems to favor the softer viewpoints held by women--and Clinton is the chief, if somewhat ironic, beneficiary.*