March 18, 2004
Who are the Bushwomen?
by Laura Flanders
an excerpt from her book, Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species
George W. Bush might never have snagged the White House if one woman had been laughed at less: Katherine Harris, Secretary of State of Florida. No one did more, more carefully, to use the power of her public office to steal the presidency for her candidate; no one was made more fun of in the media.
By the time Harris came to public attention as the arbiter of the Florida vote count in 2000, she had already been slip-sliding around election rules for years. The ambitious child of one of Florida's most powerful families, there were corporate campaign-contribution violations in her very first run for office in 1994; financial-disclosure problems when she served the state senate. Harris's record smelled so bad that when she sought to become secretary of state (Florida's top election cop), the vice-president of Common Cause Florida wondered if anyone could credibly expect her to enforce the law: "How can you come down on somebody else for violating something when you have a reputation for violating the law yourself?" he asked.
In Florida, Harris was well known as one of the most cut-throat ambitious politicians to hit the state, but in November, 2000, when she came under the national spotlight, what did Democrats, the media, and the vast majority of the public focus on? Not on her record, but her mascara, her eyeshadow, her hair. Joe Kock, her attorney, characterized Harris as "a very busy, occupied person" who was suddenly "thrown into the center of this maelstrom," and for the most part, the spin-effort worked.
Aides to Democratic contender Al Gore called Harris a "lackey" and a "flack", and Harris became known not a crook (when lawyer Alan Dershowitz called her that, he was roundly slapped down) but as "Cruella De Vil" -- a cartoon character. The Washington Post devoted an entire article to her make-up. Harris is easy to mock, wrote staff writer Robin Givhan, "because, to be honest, she seems to have applied her make-up with a trowel." Harris's make-up was hardly the point.
Invaluable to the President, under-scrutinized in the press: it's that that qualifies Harris as an honorary Bushwoman. The Bushwomen &endash; the women appointed to the inner circle of the President's cabinet and sub-cabinet &endash; are an extremist administrations female front. Cast in the public mind as maverick,or moderate, or irrelevant, laughable or benign, their well-spun image taps into convenient stereotypes, while the reality remains out of sight. If women were taken more seriously, the Bushwomen con job wouldn't stand a chance, but in the contemporary United States, it just might. Bushwomen: they're the one thing Bush has that Ronald Reagan didn't, and they ease his way to accomplish things that Reagan never could.
. . .
Do high-level female appointees like Bushwomen make a difference to voters? Halfway through the President's first term, democratic pollster Anna Greenberg doubted that the "average Jane" voter had even heard of Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Secretary of the Interior Gale Ann Norton, or Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman. Female appointees don't guarantee female support come election time, says Greenberg; but even if highly-placed females don't necessarily translate into votes, it's clear that the Republican Party thinks the Bushwomen can help. Just seven months into the Bush presidency, a Republican pllster looked at a survey and winded, "This is not happy data." He told the press. The veneer on Bush's White House was eroding, and the GOP's sweeping tax cut as well as the administration's moves on the environment seemed to be alienating a disproportionate number of women. (Bush tried to roll back reductions on the amount of arsenic permitted in drinking water and summarily pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol.) According to a July 2001 poll, while men said they were more likely to vote for a Republican than a Democrat by 43 percent to 37 percent, women were more likely to do the opposite, by 47 to 32 percent. The President's approval rating stood at a historic low for a leader so early in his first term (51 percent), and the same poll revealed a "precipitous drop" in Republican support among married women with children, the subset with whom GOP candidates traditionally do best.
The Republican answer was to pump up the profiles of the highest-ranking women in the Bush administration. In July, the White House invited female magazine editors and publishers to meet female office-holders. The RNC (Republican National Convention) announced that it would drive millions of dollars a year into a new campaign, "Winning Women," that would feature profiles of figures such as Karen P. Hughes, Christine Todd Whitman and Condoleezza Rice. The effort was to be led by the RNC's new co-chairwoman, Ann Wagner, whose name appeared nowhere without the emphatic self-description, "38-year-old suburban mom." Her ID exactly fit the demographic niche that held the party's strategists in thrall.
After the deadly attacks of September 11, 2001, American voters swung heavily towards supporting their commander in chief. The President claimed, "I really don't think about politics right now," the following January, but his political team were still at work. As the 2002 midterm elections approached, female "swing voters" were still dancing like sugar-plum fairies in their heads. Late that spring, someone on the President's staff lost a computer disk that made its way to the media. On it was senior advisor Karl Rove's election advice laid out in Power Point. President Bush, he said, needs to "grow" his outreach to Latinos, suburban women, Roman Catholics, and union members. The mix presents its challenges, but Rove knows the numbers. (It's not for nothing that he's called "Bush's Brain.") Fifty-two percent of those who vote in the US are female. With suburb-dwellers making up 51 percent of the population, suburban women constitute about 25 to 30 percent of the electorate. As pollster Greenberg explains, women, especially white, married, suburban women, are "the least solidly attached voters out there, the biggest swingers. "Enormously important," she says; everything else remaining as it is, in 2004 they could win or lost the election. They are certainly the largest "unattached" block within the Republicans' grasp.