Clinton Jilted Poor Sisters for Soccer Moms

Men were almost evenly divided between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole; it was women who gave the president a whopping 16% advantage. As Clinton shifts his gaze toward the future, hoping that history will include him among the great presidents, perhaps we ought to ask if he even deserved women’s loyalty Tuesday.

If you compare Clinton’s record with what Dole promised, the answer is clear: Women voted for the lesser of two evils. Dole opposed the Family Medical Leave Act and abortion rights and even wanted to shut down the Department of Education. Clinton, on the other hand, signed family leave into law, supported abortion rights and spoke of continuing government support for education.

But it is what Clinton failed to do that will shape his historical reputation. With his considerable charm, he appealed to working women and so-called soccer moms but failed to address their real needs. He didn’t press for a paid family medical leave law. He didn’t address working women’s child care problems. He didn’t secure health care for mothers and children who are uninsured. On the international level, he did nothing to get the Senate to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, which has been signed by most of the world’s nations, but not ours. Instead, he promoted V chips, school uniforms and curfews, none of which would damage his emerging reputation as a moderate Republican. And, for all his talk about putting people first, Clinton in fact handed over most of nation’s wealth to the Pentagon. Worried about his credibility with the military, Clinton kept funding at Cold War levels and even gave the Pentagon $11 billion more than it asked for. Yet he couldn’t find money to keep welfare mothers and disabled children from wondering how they are going to survive.

While he charmed and seduced middle class women, he virtually ignored poor and minority women. He betrayed welfare mothers when, with a huge lead, he signed the welfare bill without fighting for training and jobs for its targets. To his everlasting shame, he opposed Proposition 209 but refused to campaign against it. That the Democratic Party did nothing and spent nothing in appealing to the poor and minorities is a scandal. Clinton assumed that they wouldn’t vote anyway, so left them and their problems invisible.

A great leader would have used his huge lead in public opinion polls to galvanize a national campaign to enfranchise all those who feel shut out of electoral politics. Clinton, instead, appealed to the corporate rich, Hollywood and white suburbanites. No greatness there.

The gender gap has taken a long time to influence American politics. In 1871, Susan B. Anthony predicted that women would vote as a bloc. She was wrong. After l920, women briefly intimidated politicians into supporting prenatal care, consumer protection and child labor legislation. But as soon as politicians realized that women were likely to vote their class, racial and ethnic interests first, women’s political power evaporated.

It was not until 1980 that pollsters began to notice a gender gap in the electorate. Ronald Reagan’s early efforts to dismantle the welfare state began nudging women toward the Democratic Party. These were the unmarried or divorced women who increasingly depended on the safety net to keep them and their children from falling into destitution. In fact, the most important distinction between the sexes in this campaign was women’s greater confidence in government’s ability to help people.

Most women remember men like Clinton from their youth as the kind of guy mother warned us about--irresistibly charming, even sexy, but untrustworthy.

If Clinton wants to be remembered as a great president, he will have to do something sufficiently bold for the poor, the weak and the vulnerable. To ex-slaves, Lincoln seemed a savior. To the destitute, FDR was a lifesaver, risking new social and economic experiments in the depths of the Depression. To many blacks, JFK was heroic for embracing the civil rights movement. Although all these presidents were rather reluctant risk takers, both history and ordinary people have exalted them for restoring hope, pride and dignity to American lives.

Women chose Clinton because Dole would have endangered their lives even more. However, unless Clinton undergoes a political makeover during the next four years, my guess is that he will not be remembered as great but as an opportunist who metamorphosed into a moderate Republican.