The myth of 'security moms'

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Registered: 03-24-2003
The myth of 'security moms'
6
Thu, 10-07-2004 - 3:32pm
By Ellen Goodman | October 7, 2004

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/10/07/the_myth_of_security_moms/

MAY I ADMIT to being relieved that the spotlight is off the "security mom?" I was beginning to cringe every time she came on the screen, touted as the woman whose fear of terrorism would swing the election.



The image had evolved into a stereotype of a mother hiding in her cave beside her kids trying to decide which of the two males was more alpha.

Now the "security mom" is beginning to take her place as an urban -- or should I say suburban? -- legend. She's slowly receding into the ether of pollsterdom.

"The whole security mom thing is bogus," says pollster Anna Greenberg, a chief debunker. For openers, those legendary security moms -- white married women with children under 18 -- are only 22 percent of all women. And only one in four put terrorism at the top of her list. They are no more or less swayed by security than by their husbands.

More to the point, they aren't swinging. The married white women with young children are mostly and reliably conservative.

Never mind all the anecdotes about undecided moms scared straight into the arms of the president. They are, by and large, voting for Bush because they already are Republicans. Ta da. They are more likely to align with the president on questions of faith and values than security.

I never could figure why Bush would make women in particular feel safer. Donna Brazile, who headed the Gore campaign, tells about watching a focus group in 2000 when a woman said that picking a candidate was like picking a prom date. Gore would arrive with a corsage and ask permission from her parents. Bush would just tool up to the door in his convertible -- but she'd dash off with him in a heartbeat.

Four years later, she may have learned that going off to the prom with a guy is different from going off to war. It's not such a stretch to see her dashing date as a breezy risk-taker who didn't buckle his seat belt before he invaded a country. Bush may be unwavering, but how many women who fell for a man who was certain and strong grew up to discover, in Kerry's memorable phrase, "You can be certain and be wrong"?

As for collective mom-ness, mothers may be deeply protective of their children, but protection comes in as many shapes and sizes as mothers. There's bound to be a different idea of safety if your children are 8 and in the schoolyard or 18 and in the National Guard. When Debbie Walsh at the Center for American Women and Politics attended a focus group of older women, she found that their chief worry was that their grandchildren might be drafted. Are they security grandmas?

I'm not denying women's concerns about security. Whether it's domestic violence or crime in the streets or terrorism after 9/11, women are more likely to worry that they or theirs are vulnerable. Only 17 percent of men are personally concerned that a member of their family will be the victim of a terrorist attack, says pollster Celinda Lake. Compare that with 43 percent of women and 53 percent of mothers with children under 18.

But if you are looking for gender gaps, try this disheartening number. About 40 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. That's 29 percent of men but 47 percent of women. What do we call them? Attention Deficit Disorder Moms?

Kerry went a long way in the first debate in countering the image battered home by Republicans of an unsteady, undependable flip-flopper. On the split-screen the president didn't even look like he'd be promising prom material.

But neither man has clinched the deal with the real undecideds, about two-thirds of whom are women. Women are as much as 72 percent of the undecided voters in Pennsylvania and 68 percent in Florida. Unlike the security moms of myth, these women have a more elaborate view of security that also includes healthcare security, retirement security, economic security.

We've had an election dominated by talk of war and terrorism. The late deciders, including the half of all women voters who are unmarried, haven't heard nearly enough of the issues that will draw them out of their indecision, not to mention out of their homes and to the polls.

There are three weeks and two debates to go. My maternal instinct says that these undecided women aren't looking for an alpha president as much a candidate who can talk to them. On that score they are still feeling very insecure.

Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@ globe.com.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-04-2001
Thu, 10-07-2004 - 3:57pm
Nah - most women would still rather have a John Wayne than a Mr. Rogers when the going gets tough!
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Thu, 10-07-2004 - 11:33pm
Funny thing about your comment. I've found that those "most women" seem to find the going tough most of the time. John seems to be tired from all the tough times they seem to have on a regular basis.

Oh, well. The idea of being immortalized on black velvet by their dear wives must be reward enough.

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-12-2001
Fri, 10-08-2004 - 10:13am
I posted this in the Election 2004 folder below, but thought it might be more appropriate in response to this thread.

Bev

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/columns/thesexes/9911/

Female Trouble

While fretting about Karl Rove, the Democrats overlooked Karen Hughes. How she—and Laura Bush—are winning the election for W.

By Naomi Wolf

Should wives matter in a presidential campaign? Is it trivial to weigh Laura Bush’s gentle, Xanax-like demeanor, her faultless librarian’s poise and sincerity, against the imperious sexuality of Teresa Heinz Kerry? We often feel a twinge of guilt over our own fascination with presidential candidates’ wives—as if we are secretly reading the Star for our campaign information instead of the policy journals.

But the iconography that candidates’ wives create is important and a serious medium through which a modern candidate can send out his message. Heartbreakingly for Democrats, this is a lesson that the Republicans have learned to their vast advantage. By manipulating the images of the women around George W. Bush, including Laura herself, the Bush team has brilliantly eroded the traditional Democratic advantage among women.

What happened? Karen Hughes. The true genius behind the Bush success is not Karl Rove; she’s a suburban working mom in sensible shoes. It was clear from the start that Team Bush realized that the old, white, male face of the Republican Party was a recipe for losing those crucial suburban women in the swing states who are socially progressive and fiscally conservative. As long as the face of Republicanism was that of Newt Gingrich, ready to talk about women soldiers getting gynecological infections in foxholes, the GOP would face a Democratic hegemony, to paraphrase Rove, for the next twenty years.

So they devised a deliberate strategy that went unnoticed by Democratic strategists, most of whom are white guys over 50: to showcase a moderate, mainstream feminist makeover for the Bush brand. Everyone fell for it, including the press. Bush’s speeches are routinely cast before the eye, I am convinced, of Karen Hughes, who spins tax cuts as a boon to women entrepreneurs, like the one Laura Bush mentioned in her convention speech (Carmella Chaifos, “the only woman to own a tow-truck company in all of Iowa”). The fallen heroes of Iraq are “moms and dads.” Afghanistan was the first time U.S. troops were deployed for a feminist goal, “so Afghan girls could go to school.”

Abortion is an issue not of Ms. Magazine–style fanaticism or suicidal Republican religious reaction, but a complex issue on which “good people can disagree.” (W. mimicked his father’s trick of catering to his religious base while leaking the fact that his wife is pro-choice.)

Look at the language. Starting in 2000, every Republican-male dinosaur on TV began to sound like Oprah. Suddenly they all used the words—sensitive, comfort (or comfortable), and appreciate. George Bush is “comfortable in his skin.” Laura Bush and her husband want to “comfort” the bereaved families of dead soldiers. Republicans would speak of Bush as “sensitive” to the complexity of issues and as being someone “appreciative” of working moms. It worked frighteningly well: The words “changed the tone” of Washington Republicans from that of the losing old boys’ club of 1992 and 1996.

A key tactic is wife deployment. Is Dick Cheney a scary, old-guard, male-dinosaur guy? Send out Lynne to talk about how he whips up brunch. Karl Rove makes eggs with bacon for Mary Matalin! Laura Bush speaks eloquently about the young George W. changing the twins’ diapers. Why worry about abortion rights when you have Alan Alda in the White House? The Bush team sends out brilliant imagery of women vis-à-vis the president: carefully staging scenes in which a seated W. is listening attentively to a standing Condoleezza Rice. That image counts far more than a thousand words by John Kerry about child care.

While Bush Inc. is flooding women’s magazines with features in which Laura Bush gets out a family-friendly feminist message, Kerry et al. remain obsessed with sending white men out onto the Sunday talk shows—which women don’t watch. While Bush Inc. understands the power of the vivid visual image—dressing the entire GOP convention, for instance, in matching tangerine and turquoise, color-coordinating the Cheney grandchildren to give a visual sense of order and unity—the Democrats keep being bumped to the inside pages because they send out their candidate and his wife in neutrals. I am convinced that Michael Deaver is the invisible hand behind the calculated visuals of the Bush campaign—the signature use of deep, majestic backdrops behind the candidate, the use of jewel tones on Laura Bush and other women associated with the administration, the trick of forcing photographers to sit close to the stage so that they must shoot sharply upward, showing the candidate from a heroic angle. By contrast, the Democrats ignore them, losing women, who are simply too busy racing to get school lunches ready and kids out the door to get their impressions about the candidates from Meet the Press.

The low value Kerry’s team is assigning to both the visual story of the campaign and the role of gender imagery explains his drop in the polls after the GOP convention. Contrary to RNC spin about “earth tones” and “alpha males,” I was actually an adviser on women’s issues for the Gore campaign. But any cultural critic can tell you that a presidential campaign involves powerful gender archetypes, and presidents are archetypes of male potency. Republicans guided by Deaver understand this: It’s why you saw Ronald Reagan posed by a horse holding a riding crop, or W. in flight gear. And spouses play a massive role in enhancing or undermining the potency of a male candidate.

So Laura Bush, in speaking warmly of her mate’s “wrestling” with issues of war and peace, enhances his potency. This does not contradict my earlier point about appealing to swing voters; it has been well established that modern women maddeningly long for men who are tender in private but authoritative in public. Unfortunately, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s speech, which all but ignored her husband, did more to emasculate him than the opposition ever could. By publicly shining the light on herself rather than her husband, she opened a symbolic breach in Kerry’s archetypal armor. Listen to what the Republicans are hitting Kerry with: Indecisive. Effete. French. They are all but calling this tall, accomplished war hero gay.

The charges are sticking because of Teresa Heinz Kerry. Let’s start with “Heinz.” By retaining her dead husband’s name—there is no genteel way to put this—she is publicly, subliminally cuckolding Kerry with the power of another man—a dead Republican man, at that. Add to that the fact that her first husband was (as she is herself now) vastly more wealthy than her second husband. Throw into all of this her penchant for black, a color that no woman wears in the heartland, and you have a recipe for just what Kerry is struggling with now: charges of elitism, unstable family relationships, and an unmanned candidate.

Hillary Rodham Clinton merely insisted on using “Rodham” as part of her married name; Heinz Kerry is insisting on the primacy of another man. She could, though, have spoken about what she admires in her husband; she could have spoken about her own work in terms of service, family, and community. All those are ways of being oneself while still showing deference to women voters who are not wealthy and multilingual. I am a feminist, but I still believe that a candidate’s spouse, male or female, needs to understand something that Republicans get now but Democrats still don’t: It is not about them. If you are a president’s wife—or husband—your life and imagery do not belong just to you. For the duration, you belong to us, and you need to reflect and respect our own aspirations and dreams.

In Elizabeth Edwards, the Democrats finally have a down-to-earth, appealing mom-messenger to bring the swing voters home. Funny and family-oriented, aware of the struggles of middle-class working moms, she is even the size of the average American woman. She alone can counteract the urbane wealth of Teresa Heinz Kerry, who reads as being so unmaternal that her denying the small, scared Edwards child his thumb resonated nationally. Yet where is the mom-shaped stealth missile Mrs. Edwards now? Instead of presenting the Kerry-Edwards family-friendly policies and domestic security on Oprah, Mrs. Edwards has disappeared.

Bush knows that Laura is his outreach to that swing voter in Michigan who is juggling work and family, who wants to feel that her abortion rights are secure and her kids are safe. Whenever his anti-environment, anti-choice, anti-peace, anti-working-class-women policies obtrude onto her consciousness, all he needs to do is point to Laura; his recent stump speeches promise that if you vote for him, you get four more years of her. Who stole feminism? The Republicans. How neatly has Bush Inc. redeemed in positive terms the Clintons’ ill-conceived promise, a decade ago, that we would get “two for one.”

girl in chair
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Registered: 03-24-2003
Fri, 10-08-2004 - 10:38am
I'm not so sure about that. I know some women that can do a fair John Wayne as well, others who would not be and would not wish such a partner. I think Ellen is right on target.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2003
Fri, 10-08-2004 - 10:44am
There is some validity to that... the problem is so much of the compassion side of this administration is phony, and only appears at election time. I love Teresa Heinz, and so hope she gets a chance to shine. That is not a knock against Laura... but she is marginalised except to fetch George votes. After the election, it's duct tape over her mouth.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-22-2003
Fri, 10-08-2004 - 12:50pm
THis is my opinion, but as a mom, I would definitely not vote for Bush. I don't think he would care if my son died in a fake war. He is totally clueless about AQ. AQ has become stronger because of the IRAQ war. The world is less safe because of it and my kids are less safe because of it. Bush is not smart enough to play a game of chess. I fear AQ is winning in this game. But we all know that this administration had Iraq on hteir mind from the very begining, even before 9/11. The reason is oil. I agree that Bush was doing right for America but that was in terms of oil resources. It is very very important for US economy and the American way to have plenty of oil and it is the foreign policy of US to acquire this most precious resource, so he was definitely trying to do something that was good for America, but the question now is at what cost? Is it worth the American and Iraqi lives for that? I don't know why main media pretends their is no oil connection in this war. I feel they are cowards. Becuase it is so real and so mind blowing( catastrophic revelation). That is the only reason for war now. Because oil is power and US has to get it in order to remain powerfull.