Women of Influence Feel Estranged From the GOP

You are at the table, with the women, and the evening is not going well for Bob Dole.

“I think what is happening to the Republican Party,” says Eileen Padberg, “is that it’s losing all of us, the people here tonight, at this table.”

Heads nod in agreement, which is not entirely unexpected because public opinion surveys have already documented Dole’s difficulties in California, particularly among women.

While party leaders were cheered by Dole’s visit to the state last week, there is no argument about the vast distance he must overcome. In March, a Los Angeles Times Poll showed Dole trailing Bill Clinton in the presidential race by 29 percentage points among California women, and 21 points overall. An exit poll of voters in California’s March 26 primary showed Clinton and Dole virtually dead-even among women in Orange County, the state’s GOP stronghold.

The “why” behind these numbers is the question of the evening.

Here at an Italian restaurant in Irvine, you have invited five influential and successful Orange County women--four registered Republicans, one a former member of the party--to a private table in the corner of the kitchen. You intend to listen in on an old-fashioned conversation about politics and 1996’s GOP discontent.

The guests are women who have risen to prominence in business, academia and politics.

“I’m an activist Republican and a Republican political consultant, and my observation is that the party is pushing women away,” says Padberg, president of Eileen Padberg Consulting. “I look at politics like a pendulum. And for the last 10 years it has swung to the conservative and religious right. Religious and family values should be defined by individuals and not by government. It’s gone too far.”

“I agree . . . and women are the heart and soul of this party,” says Julie Newcomb Hill, president and CEO of Costain Homes, the first female chief executive of a publicly held U.S. residential construction company. She is a registered Republican but describes herself as a “defector” who votes situationally.

“There is a definition of family that is exclusionary,” she continues. “Republicans are still stuck in the patriarchal male model of the family. . . . But now, for the first time, there are growing numbers of career women who do not fit that model. And the Republican Party says through its policies that this isn’t right.”

When it comes to the national mood, polls have become our standard of weights and measures. But polls are chilly, random, scientific, anonymous and they depend on the wisdom and interests of the questioner. This evening’s dinner conversation strives toward the same goal by going in the opposite direction: exploring political views that are personal, instinctive and hotblooded, and with the participants themselves choosing the topics of interest.

Rather than selected randomly, guests for this dinner are invited because they embody the Republican ideal that hard work leads to success. Yet all had previously expressed unease with today’s GOP, and therefore the presidential prospects of Dole.

And women like these do not just voice opinions--they are community exemplars whose opinions are heard.

“I’ll bet the Republican Party itself is having little dinners like this one all across the country, trying to figure out what’s going on,” says Jammie Baugh, Southern California general manager and executive vice president of Nordstrom department stores.

“You think so? I doubt it. But, well, it would be a good start,” says Charmayne Bohman, a member of the Westminster City Council, a psychologist and coordinator of graduate programs at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

In recent elections, Baugh has voted Republican but changed her registration to “decline to state” out of “disgust” with the ever-conservative leanings of the Orange County GOP establishment. Bohman entered politics for the first time in 1992 and won her council seat as a “moderate usually at odds with my party.”

The fifth woman at the dinner table is Linda White-Peters, assistant vice chancellor for university relations at UC Irvine. A self-described moderate, she “enthusiastically” volunteered to help the Ronald Reagan campaign in California in 1984. Now she explains her politics in short lament: “I feel frustrated.”

Anyone familiar with the demographics of the American electorate is not surprised at the existence of a gender gap. But what might be a surprising, at least to a man--and, after all, the candidates for president are men--is the extent to which these successful and powerful women discuss gender as central to politics in 1996.

To generalize: Today’s women, having forced social change, hold more compassionate and considered views about America’s struggles, its diversity and everyday chaos, and its cultural ambiguities. But the GOP harks to a nostalgic stereotype of family and values--a stereotype that has no place at the head of the table for women like these.

“I think that’s one of the reasons Clinton gets bashed so much. Because he stews and thinks and hears all sides. He is inclusionary,” says Newcomb Hill.

Padberg interjects: “That’s why he’s ahead with women. Women see that as a plus. Men see that as not being decisive.”

Baugh believes that the Democratic Party is more open to these kinds of discussions: “In the Republican Party, you feel like raising your hand: ‘Excuse me, do I have permission to think?’

“It strikes me as a business that’s out of touch with its consumers. And when a business gets to that point, it almost has to die before it is reborn. . . .”

Bohman argues that gender differences are circumstantial, not intrinsic. Science suggests that about 25% of the population is “intuitive” without regard to gender, she says. But intuitive men are seldom found in the rough-and-tumble of politics, while she sees intuitive women drawn into social debates as a consequence of their own struggles for empowerment.

“One of the reasons there is this period of discontent is that historically we have a generation of women that is very different from any time in history. Women like me who came out of, for lack of a better term, a ‘50s “Father Knows Best” generation and went through the women’s movement. Now we ask, ‘Who are we?’ in ways that previous generations have never done.”

Newcomb Hill puts it this way: “We have become the men our mothers wanted us to marry. We have become responsible, successful.”

But for these women, the GOP is like a club you joined years ago, only to see the membership change, and suddenly you find yourself not among friends but noisy strangers with strident ideas that make you uncomfortable.

In the course of wine, appetizers, pasta and dessert, the evening’s conversation reveals only small fragments of personal lives, appropriate considering the topic of politics. Among the guests are wives, mothers and singles. They share one thing foremost: Expressions of joy for shared pleasures in pursuits with other women, whether just for fun or more serious aims. Without really intending, they revel in the kind of contemporary group identity that is acknowledged and cultivated by Democrats but often debased by Republicans.

“Do you think they know they’re losing us? ‘Hello? Hello?’ ” says Baugh.

So what about Dole?

Newcomb Hill makes a comparison. In the Revolutionary War, the British wore red coats and fought orderly, open skirmishes only to fall to Minutemen wearing drab clothes and hiding behind trees. “I see Bob Dole wandering into the forest wearing a red jacket.”

Says Padberg: “The reason George Bush lost [in 1992] is that Republicans are getting too scary, too mean-spirited. Imagine, an incumbent losing to a guy without any moral values? . . . And I’ll make a prediction: In 1996, not only is a Democratic president going to win, but there are going to be big changes in Congress.”

And Clinton?

Generational politics seems to work to his advantage at this table, where everyone is over 40 but where America’s war means Vietnam, not World War II. “You have a sense that he’s lived in the same time you have,” says Baugh.

“It’s the old versus the new,” adds Newcomb Hill.

But this group regards fidelity as a matter of morality, sometimes called character, and at this table Clinton is regarded--and there is no discreet way to put it--as a philanderer.

Says Padberg: “How can you trust a man who screws around?”

“I feel torn,” says Baugh. “In a business relationship, I wouldn’t care. But in a personal relationship, there is no second chance on that. So do I think he’s trying to accomplish important things? Yes. But I’m not comfortable.”

Still, Dole and Clinton are less topics of interest than the GOP’s rightward drift. In this regard, the conversation is telling for what is not discussed, or is touched upon only lightly.

Nothing is said about campaign strategy, message, advertising, fund-raising or Dole’s choice of a running mate--topics that consume most of the salon chatter in Washington and much of the media’s time and space.

Or consider abortion. Public opinion polls often use abortion rights as an explanatory metaphor for the gender gap. During this dinner, only a few references to “choice” are voiced, and they are in the context of a larger list of social priorities. Only once does the subject receive a full sentence, when Newcomb Hill expresses frustration with the GOP’s “white male outlook.”

“If we could snap our fingers and it was men who got pregnant, what would the Republican Party think about abortion then?” she asks.

No one feels a need to reply.

Instead, the conversation is broadly idealistic. If politics is about us, why don’t we do a better job for ourselves? Why don’t the best people run for office? Why the mean, glib, superficial, disingenuous nature of modern campaigns? And what of the real problems that are not debated?

“I feel scared. I look at violence in our society, and our prison system. Projections are that we’ll have 200,000 people in state prison by 2000. That’s scary,” says White-Peters.

For these women, success and position are not the end of achievement, but are just another starting point. For at least some of them, the biggest change in politics is the shift in their own attitudes.

“I was drawn to the Republicans out of economics. But as you approach 50--I’m 43--you feel a turning point. I’m thinking more now about life’s resume, larger questions,” says Baugh.

The conversation shifts. It is an old American tradition to be skeptical of politicians. But sometimes healthy skepticism becomes dispiriting cynicism. Newcomb Hill draws a breath and suggests that Americans may be too hard on politicians and too easy on themselves these days.

“We idealize our politicians the same way we idealize our relationships. When you fall in love, you idealize that person. You look at the mirror they are holding in their hand and you fall in love with that person’s perception of your best self. You fall in love with the fact that this person thinks you’re wonderful.

“And then things start to change . . . and we reveal ourselves to ourselves, and to mask our own inadequacies we scapegoat our politicians.”