At the height of the real estate boom in the 2000s, Robert M. “Robby” Browne, 2007 Corcoran Real Estate National Sales Person of the Year, put on his woman’s bathing suit and silver heels and walked out onto the Club Exit stage. A thousand screaming, cheering, photo-snapping real estate brokers roared their approval. The openly gay Browne, six feet tall and nearly two hundred pounds, danced a sweetly amateurish version of the Village People’s gay anthem, “YMCA,” as ten half naked male Broadway dancers backed him up.
“Is there any question of who the star is?” Browne asks proudly, watching the video today. For most real estate brokers, a third year as Corcoran’s top producer would have been stardom enough, but when Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman began planning the 2007 event, Browne thought he wouldn’t bother to attend. He’d had enough top-earner, $100-million-club years. He was turning sixty, and he was thinking about his life as a whole. Finally he said he would show up, but only if he could accept the award in drag. Browne’s beloved gay older brother, Roscoe Willett Browne, died of AIDS in 1985. He’d never forget the day when President George H. W. Bush said that dying of AIDS wasn’t as important as losing your job. “George H. W. Bush did not acknowledge the sacrifice of my brother and our love. My brother. He’s in his eighties and he still has his brothers and I don’t have any brothers,” says Browne. “And my brother was a Yalie and he was in Vietnam; Bush, how could he be more your person?” We exist, says Browne, looking at the video of his awards ceremony. “This show says we exist.”
Exist? You can’t pick up a paper without seeing evidence that gay people exist and are compelling American society to acknowledge them. The federal government protects them from homophobic violence and twenty-one states have laws against discrimination; 141 cities across the country constitute enclaves of equal treatment. A federal nondiscrimination bill gains more support in Congress with each passing year. Poll numbers show Americans overwhelmingly support protection for gays and lesbians against hate crimes and equality in health benefits, housing, and jobs. In July 2010, a federal judge struck down the federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act, that excluded gays from the federal benefits for which married people were eligible and that allowed the states to refuse to recognize the marriages if they pleased. In August, another federal judge invalidated the amendment to the California constitution, added by Proposition 8, that limited marriage to a man and a woman. September had hardly dawned when a third federal judge found the policy requiring gay soldiers to hide their sexual orientation, don’t ask/don’t tell, unconstitutional as well. The United States Congress repealed the law prohibiting out gays and lesbians from serving in the armed forces. Right after the Fourth of July in 2011, the federal courts in California ordered the United States military to stop screwing around getting ready and just cease enforcing it at once.
Gay playwright Edward Albee’s play about the unbounded nature of love objects, “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?,” won the Tony Award for best play in 2002; the heroic biopic about San Francisco gay activist Harvey Milk, “Milk,” won two Oscars in 2009. So many people in show business have come out as gay that some gay media are now pooh-poohing their confessions as cheap shots meant to bolster their flagging careers.
Two of the most famous heterosexual lawyers in America, David Boies and Ted Olson, brought the suit against the California marriage ban in 2009. Win or lose, Boies and Olson’s case has already achieved the crucial social goal of making same-sex marriage a legitimate claim. On the eve of the closing argument in the case in 2010, a New York Times editorial called same-sex marriage “A Basic Civil Right.” In 2011 the poll numbers in favor of same-sex marriage crossed 50 percent. Regardless of intermittent setbacks, gay people like Robby Browne have succeeded in forcing society to acknowledge that they exist—as humans with a right to life and as American citizens with a claim to equality under the United States Constitution. Most of all, they have staked their claim to be treated, without lying or hiding, as moral persons, whose lives, loves, and ambitions have value and cannot be discounted.
The year 2009 saw the fortieth anniversary of the uprising in a New York gay bar called Stonewall. In 1969, “homosexuals,” people who wanted to have sex with members of their own sex, were considered sinful by the church, their sexual practices were criminal in forty-nine states, the psychiatrists said they were crazy, and the State Department held that they were subversive. Forty-two years later, almost to the day, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of the state of New York, signed the law that enabled them to marry in New York. The Empire State Building was lit up in the rainbow colors of the symbolic gay flag.
How did this tiny minority of despised and marginalized people do it? They did it in America, what we philosophers call a “liberal (small L) state.” America’s roots go back to the beginning of modern Western political thought in the seventeenth century, when the philosopher Thomas Hobbes speculated that people create their governments; states are not handed down from God to Adam to the king. During the century and a half after Hobbes wrote, the English and their American colonists launched a variety of social movements—the English Revolution and the American Revolution among them—that pushed and pulled on the deal between people and government until they produced the basic outline of the modern western state, the liberal state. The liberal state makes three promises to its citizens. First, security: the state will protect its citizens from one another and not hurt them worse than the people it is protecting them from. Second, liberty: citizens have certain rights as human beings that even the state cannot interfere with. And finally, self-governance: for those aspects of life the state can control, citizens must decide for themselves on equal terms what they want the state to do. It’s a good deal. No wonder so many people want in.
By the late twentieth century, Americans had already undertaken two great social movements for inclusion in the liberal state, the racial civil rights movement and the feminist movement. Since people aren’t all that easy to organize, theorists have often speculated about how they did it. Their conclusions are that movements arise only when people come to see that their problems are political, not natural or personal, what theorists call “oppositional consciousness.” This “aha!” moment in the civil rights movement dates back at least to W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, when he observed that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” In addition, movements need access to resources, as when the NAACP started getting hold of real money and the movement gained astute leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr.
Students of the racial civil rights movement made the assumption that before people engage in new movements they do a rational cost-benefit analysis, weighing the benefits of political action against the cost. When people created social movements against all odds and acted against their own individual self-interest on behalf of the group, theorists had to rethink what really drives people to take action. As the racial civil rights movement gave way to other movements—the feminist, and, finally, the gay-liberation movement—sociologists produced more theories to explain the new movements; indeed, the later thinking is often called “new social-movement” theory. In the newer thinking, theorists speculated that people draw their sense of who they are from the groups or social networks they are already in. From those starting places, they conceive a positive vision of themselves and then a desire to change the way the larger society perceives them all. New social-movement theorists came to the realization that sometimes group identity is so strong that people act on behalf of the group whether it benefits them individually or not.
Classical or new, each of the movements before the gay movement was seeking citizenship in the liberal state. Women and racial minorities did not necessarily ask the dominant society to love them or approve of them. They sought to be secure against violence, to be tolerated as they exercised their human liberty, and to have equal access to political and economic life. Each movement got traction in these crucial areas. But both of them fell short of achieving all the elements of a full human life for most of the people they represented: they got little or no economic assistance or cultural validation, and, when the inevitable backlash came, they stalled or lost ground. It would take a newer new movement to make the next moves: it would take the gay revolution.
The gay revolution achieved more because it faced different challenges. The path to liberal equality almost always involves mimicking as much as possible the behaviors and beliefs of the straight white men in power. The racial civil rights and feminist movements both made substantial detours into defending difference—black separatism and difference feminism. They failed to establish that their divergent cultures were as worthy as the dominant one and all they did was to split their movements. At the end of the day, both these modern movements got most of their traction from maximizing their similarity to dominant political and social hierarchies.
By definition, people involved in the gay revolution could not replicate the majority behavior. Their very political identity was behavior that distinguished them from the majority, including, but not limited to, their sex lives. The liberal state has a basic concept of a person entitled to be a citizen. When gay activists began their efforts, the churches considered them sinful, all but one state criminalized their sex acts, the doctors thought they were crazy, and politicians saw them as traitors to the nation. Sinners were kept away from sacred rites like marriage; criminals were imprisoned; crazy people were put in asylums; and people of doubtful loyalty were fired from their government jobs. Sinful, criminal, crazy, and subversive, the gays who made the gay revolution had the vastly harder task of convincing society to recognize they were even suitable candidates for citizenship despite their difference. Although liberalism pretends to be morally neutral, homosexual sexual behavior pressed that liberal commitment to the limit. In so doing, instead of bringing their marginal group into conformity with the mainstream norms, they challenged the accepted versions of sin, crime, sanity, and loyalty and changed America for everyone.
The movement succeeded, uniquely and in large part because, at the critical moments, its leaders made a moral claim. “Gay,” as movement pioneer Franklin Kameny put it on the iconic button of the gay revolution in 1968, “Is Good.” Even though it’s different. No one told it better than activist Arthur Evans: “It was more than just being gay and having gay sex. We discovered who we were and we built authentic lives around who we were and we supported each other doing that and in the process came to very important questions about the meaning of life, ethics, the vision of the common good and we debated these issues and we lived them.”
Morally ambitious and clearly identified as different, the gay movement came from further behind than either the civil rights or the feminist movements had done. It took on the liberal state and achieved formal equality, as did the other two movements. During the AIDS epidemic, it took on not just oppression, but neglect. And then it took on the traditional institutions of heterosexual morality—marriage and the military—and is rapidly conquering those arenas as well.
Fueled by its moral ambition, the gay movement is the model of a new era. It is ironic, yet fitting, that the only counterpart to the morally driven gay revolution is its contemporary and fiercest opponent, the morally driven religious right. Indeed, it is the moral certainty of the gay revolution that explains why, unlike the racial and feminist movements, it has been able to stand up to that powerful counterforce and, slowly but surely, prevail.
The theories all suggest that a whole lot of things have to go really right for people to act collectively against legitimate political authority. Lacking the religious and historical jet fuel of racial civil rights and the demographic advantage of feminism, the gay revolution started out from much the weakest position of any of the modern movements. Brilliantly led, endlessly resourceful, and stunningly creative, it came the furthest. When we ask how a cross-dressing homosexual activist got to be the poster boy of the most successful real estate brokerage firm in New York, we are also asking how people cooperate to get anything done, much less take on their whole society and wrench it onto a different path altogether. The gay Victory is not just a story, although that would be enough. It’s an epic.
From the book “Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution.” Copyright © 2012 by Linda Hirshman. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
“The time has come,” says the hero of Tony Kushner’s award-winning play “Angels in America” in 1996. “We will be citizens.”
Looks like the 2012 election will be the moment. First, the Romney campaign appointed an openly gay foreign policy advisor, Richard Grenell. “It’s not an issue for us,” Eric Fehrenstrom, Romney’s senior adviser, reportedly said after Grenell disclosed that he was gay.
Within days, religious conservative and plain old conservative opinion makers in the Republican Party orbit unleashed a tsunami of criticism. The gay diplomatic expert actually supported same-sex marriage; what does his appointment say about Romney’s commitments, they demanded to know. Told to lie low until the controversy blew over, Grenell resigned, leaving the Romney campaign looking clumsy or spineless (or both).
Before the Obama campaign could enjoy even a few days of superior risk management, Vice President Joe Biden went on “Meet the Press” to announce that he was “perfectly comfortable” with same-sex marriage. The White House spent the rest of the day in Grenell mode, arguing that Biden wasn’t signaling a mutation in the president’s evolving gay marriage position. The issue ate up most of press secretary Jay Carney’s press briefing yesterday, as inconsistency-sniffing media ordered him to stop reciting talking points and admit the administration’s position was nonsense.
Why is this happening? Gays are at most a small percentage of the population. Support for same-sex marriage just outpolled opposition within the last year. Wasn’t it supposed to be the economy, stupid?
Biden unwittingly revealed the answer when explaining why he was in favor of marriage. He knew so many people, he said, and saw what it meant to them and to their children. He told a story of attending a fundraiser at the home of a gay couple and how impressed he was with the way they were raising their children. Even among Republicans, as Grenell’s appointment reflects, gays are out and in too great numbers for the issue to be swept into the closet once again.
The last time the gay revolution was on the table during a presidential election was 1992. Then, Bill Clinton, revealing a most uncharacteristic naiveté about the political landscape, casually announced during a Q&A at Harvard that, if elected, he would lift the ban on gays in the military. He reiterated the commitment later at a gay fundraiser arranged by longtime FOB David Mixner. Although it didn’t cost him the election, Clinton’s premature suggestion of gay military service triggered a devastating battle in the very first days of his new administration and produced the loathsome “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which embedded the exclusion into law, lasting 17 years. But that was then.
In the two decades since Clinton ran, America has changed and the change is bottom up, not the result of one man’s friendship with the inexperienced candidate. Partly because of the AIDS epidemic, which outed gay people from Roy Cohn to Rock Hudson, and partly because of the relentless ground game of gay organizations like Freedom to Marry, and partly because of, as Biden said, “Will and Grace,” gay people are an acknowledged part of the social scene. When Democratic politicians started on the fundraising circuit after Congress repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the 2010 lame duck session, they found to their surprise that it was the most popular thing they did all term.
Being visible, it now takes a visible effort to harm and marginalize them. The Republican right’s attack on the uber-conservative Richard Grenell and the graceless backward walk of the Obama campaign after Biden spoke demonstrate how ugly such efforts look when they are out in the open. It was one thing when black people willingly walked to the back of the bus. It was quite another when Birmingham sheriff Bull Connor had to use fire hoses to keep them down. Although it’s impossible to predict when the next incident will arise, it’s going to keep happening, certainly when the Democratic Party platform committee starts its deliberations. Smart campaigns would get out in front of the issue. Because there is no getting out of the way.
It’s the ideology, stupid. Democrats think Americans should learn to play well with others. Republicans do not.
This should not be news. A revived conservative movement dating back to the Fifties has succeeded in locking the Republicans into the philosophy of possessive individualism that was always a strand in the American story. In turn, they have portrayed the Democrats as the collectivist Other. This election the Democrats, or at least their presidential candidate, Barack Obama, has decided he can no longer duck the fight. In a fiery speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week Obama put it baldly: “This is not just another run of the mill political debate. I’ve said it’s the defining issue of our time and I believe it. What leaders in both parties have traditionally understood is that the [Democratic government programs] aren’t part of some scheme to redistribute wealth from one group to another. They are expressions of the fact that we are one nation.”
Republicans, Obama charged, are engaged in an attempt to impose a “radical” change of vision on the country – “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that allows us to “think only about ourselves” and not about “our fellow citizens with whom we share a community.”
After decades of Democratic evasion, from Mike Dukakis’ “it’s about competence” to the new Democrats’ “reinventing government,” Obama chose a great moment to join the fight between individualism and community at last. This cannot be happenstance. The Republicans have chosen the perfect symbol for the Democrats to confront – the stunningly wealthy scion of a privileged family who made his fortune in the most individualistic of all capitalist enterprises – leveraged buyouts.
Mitt Romney lost no time in taking up the ideological challenge. Just days after Obama laid down the gauntlet, Romney agreed that this was the philosophy election: “This November, we will face a defining decision. Our choice will not be one of party or personality. This election will be about principle.”
And the principle is that “if you worked hard, and took some risks, that there was the opportunity to build a better life for your family and for the next generation.”
Let the great race begin: “Instead of picking winners and losers with taxpayer dollars, I will make sure that every entrepreneur gets a fair shot and that every business plays by the same rules. I will create an environment where our businesses and workers can compete and win.” And not only will the strongest Americans win, the race is wide open: “I will welcome the best and the brightest to our shores.”
Americans should be grateful to both candidates for finally giving us the choice (not the echo) as the original conservative revivalist, Barry Goldwater, presciently put it so long ago. Smart men, they both understand that it’s ideology all the way down. As we philosophers have always known (I love saying that in an election piece), political contests are ultimately about what each side counts as evidence and what the evidence tells them about what it means to be a good person.
What can people know? The Democratic vision recognizes that people can feel the pain of others. “Who are these Americans?” Obama asks, invoking that capacity. “Many are someone’s grandparents who, without Medicaid, won’t be able to afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s Syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the people who count on Medicaid.” The Republican vision does not see pain; it sees only “success.” Romney’s characters are “risk takers,” “winners” (and “losers”) in “races” won, presumably, by the fittest, who then raise up . . . their families.
People who can see the pain of others and the risks that cannot be controlled by individual effort make one kind of politics. People who see success and think that people are responsible for protecting themselves and their families make a different kind of politics.
When the debate that Obama and Romney have revived started in western politics centuries ago people had not made their own politics for a long time. They lived under the hereditary rule of various kings and princes. So they argued mostly about what kinds of societies they should make, being human. But Americans have been governing themselves for more than two hundred years. It is an unchallenged assumption of American politics that Americans are basically the good guys. So the debate is shaping up over what kind of societies Americans do make, being American. Barack Obama called it a matter of patriotism, not human nature.
From 2012, Obama has the better argument, as a society of some empathy and collective risk management and opportunity creation has been the norm at least since the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century and certainly since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933. Predictably, then Obama calls the current Republican ideological crusade “an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.” Not surprisingly, Romney harks back to a mistier America, where his “grandfather” pulled himself up by his bootstraps and started the Romney family success drama.
To the Republican ideology, American politics since the New Deal at least is a usurpation, not a genuine expression of American character. Not coincidentally, constitutional lawyers around the country are holding their collective breath waiting to see if an ideologically conservative majority of the Supreme Court will reverse the health care law and roll back the understanding of the constitution that made the New Deal possible as a first step in restoring the old order.
The election is the second.
New Deal analogies are rampant these days. This is not hyperbole. Not since the election of 1932 has the direction of America’s future been so starkly contested. Let the wild rumpus begin.
Writing in Salon, Natasha Lennard proposes that with the warm weather we can again expect the Occupy movement to shoot up. Arab Spring, American Spring. She’s right about one thing: Like in the decades before the Arab Spring, it has been a long, cold, American winter. In the 30 years since coming to power here, Republicans have used their initial ascent to power to seal themselves into office as tightly as the pharaohs. Smart commentators have noted how lawless the conservatives are in making substantive decisions, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is how they use their tenure to make it increasingly impossible to oust them.
With this week’s Supreme Court hearings — which will end, liberals worry, with the justices overturning healthcare reform — we are nearing the apotheosis of conservative power. Let us recount how we got here: In 2000, a mob of conservative thugs stopped the vote recount in Florida. And that was before the court got involved, the five conservative justices seizing the election and handing the White House to George W. Bush. Secure in the tenure of their undemocratically selected president, the two older conservative justices, William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, retired from the bench. Bush replaced them with two young conservatives, destined, by constitutional design and the miracles of modern medicine, to dominate the court into the foreseeable future. At the Supreme Court, it’s always winter (and never Christmas).
The stunningly inept performance by the Bush administration unforeseeably produced the first Democratic federal government since 1994. Immediately thereafter, the conservative Supreme Court majority ruled that the GOP’s wealthy sponsors could spend an unlimited amount of the money putting conservatives in office. Now, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, appointed, in part, by the conservative president they put in the White House, is preparing to wipe from the statute books the only piece of meaningful progressive legislation in the last half century, passed during the brief Indian summer of a two-year Democratic majority.
And it’s not just the federal government. In 2010, fueled, in part, by the money the conservative justices unleashed, the conservatives took over state legislatures across the country. In power, they enacted a series of measures that should make Hosni Mubarak blush. They redrew the legislative maps to guarantee that they would hold a majority of the legislatures, state and federal, regardless of whether they failed to gain a majority of actual votes. (The design of the Senate, favoring sparsely populated rural states, already way overrepresents the Republicans.) Using a panoply of legislative strategies, they made it infinitely harder for the Democrats to register their supporters and for the Democratic voters, even if registered, to vote. Voters must be reported within 24 hours of being registered or penalties will be levied on the laggard registrars. Would-be voters must produce a fistful of identity documents, notoriously more common among old white (Republican) voters than the youthful and nonwhite Americans likely to support the Democrats. If they run the registration gauntlet, they must again verify their identity on Election Day, with the same culturally skewed set of papers. In the swing state of Florida, the New York Times reports, the activists have given up registering new voters: Too perilous.
True, the Democrats have not been models of political virtue. Cowardly when confronted by their powerful adversaries, confused about the moral grounding of their political vision, faithless to their allies, racketing from one trendy policy initiative to another, without anything resembling long-term planning — with enemies like the Democrats, who needs friends? But blaming the victim is way too easy. Democrats made the mistake of behaving as if the American rules of representative government still applied. Confronted with the lawless conservative Republicans, their fate was sealed.
Last week the overwhelmingly Republican New Hampshire statehouse voted, well, overwhelmingly to preserve gay marriage. The bill under consideration would have made New Hampshire the first state to repeal gay marriage. Initially, gay activists only hoped to keep the vote under two-thirds of the House, so that Democratic Gov. John Lynch could torpedo it with a veto. But when it came up for a vote, it didn’t even capture a majority of the House’s 297 Republican representatives, elected in the conservative tsunami of 2010.
How can this be? We’re in the middle of a Republican presidential primary, normally a time for conservatives to beat their chests over social and culture-war issues. And the most recent Republican Party platform promises to amend the United States Constitution to prohibit any further gay nuptials.
Freedom to Marry, which led the campaign against the repeal bill, credits its success in part to inroads it has made nationally with Republicans. Freedom to Marry’s founder, Evan Wolfson, credits conservatives like Ted Olson — who led the challenge to Proposition 8 in California — and former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman with accelerating that trend. Mehlman, newly out a year or two ago, was “very effective,” Wolfson says, in guiding them in New Hampshire. And polling showing an overwhelming opposition to the bill in New Hampshire certainly did not hurt.
What this conventional analysis misses is how weird the New Hampshire Legislature is. As a result of a failure to agree on redistricting 10 years ago, the New Hampshire Supreme Court brought in an outside consultant, who created large multi-member districts for the state. Under his plan, there are an unbelievable 403 members of the statehouse. Many districts have as many as four or more members representing them. If the U.S. Congress were constituted like the New Hampshire Legislature, it would be just shy of 100,000 members. New Hampshire pays its 400-plus legislators almost nothing for their service, and they don’t have to be in session very much. Taken together, these characteristics make for a very unusual legislative population.
First, they’re almost always newbies. Multi-member districts like New Hampshire’s tend to vacillate wildly between parties, because there is no partisan gerrymandering to protect the status quo. Predictably, New Hampshire went astonishingly Democratic in 2006 and then unbelievably Republican four short years later. Second, the people who go to the Legislature regard it as more like a civic duty than the first step on the road to a career in politics. Random people, say, angered by a power plant or by the treatment of the mentally ill can run for office, and win with just a few thousand votes. As a result, the 297 Republicans in the 2012 New Hampshire House of Representatives actually function more like a plebiscitary democracy than a representative government organized by party.
Given the Republican legislators’ plebeian roots, the results in New Hampshire are more promising than the jubilant headlines and the conventional explanations. It suggests a support for gay marriage in actual communities — a support that might be obscured if these communities’ representatives were elected in a way that required them to stick more strictly to the GOP’s anti-gay party line.
To be sure, New Hampshire is not a pure sample of the national Republican Party. But for some time, polling has been hinting at a steady increase in support for same-sex marriage even among Republicans. The recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll not only showed 49 percent of Americans in favor (with only 40 percent against) but a 9-point rise in Republican support for marriage, to 31 percent in favor.
It’s not that Republicans have suddenly turned into agents of social change. Rick Santorum is legendary for his enmity to same-sex marriage, and Mitt Romney sketched out his position recently in a press release describing same-sex marriage as against “our values.” Even in New Hampshire, Ovid Lamontagne and Kevin Smith, the 2012 Republican candidates for governor, who are running conventional campaigns with all the political constraints missing in the weird New Hampshire Legislature, both say they would sign a bill repealing same-sex marriage if the Legislature produced one.
But here’s the point: They’re not shouting over each other with anti-gay positions. Lamontagne says the issue is “not a top priority,” as he doesn’t think it “concerns residents” as much as other issues, and Kevin Smith doesn’t want it on his agenda, either.
In fact, even Romney and Santorum aren’t pushing their anti-gay-marriage lines as aggressively as they are other social issues regarding women’s health. When asked how Republicans could be moving in the direction of gay rights while fighting a scorched earth campaign against women, Wolfson noted that one important factor is that at the end of the day gay rights don’t threaten the private regime of white male power the way racial and feminist movements do. And of course it doesn’t hurt the gay cause that fearless advocates relentlessly extract a price for attacking their community. Google “Santorum.”
Boy, am I tired of hearing from the women at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. I am tired of Jennifer Crider (email yesterday: “Violence Against Women”), Diana DeGette (email the day before: “Vile”), Kelly Ward (last Tuesday: “How Much Worse Can It Get”), and even executive director Robby Mook, whatever gender Robby is (979,540 [names on petition against Republican War on Women]). Oh, the Republican War on Women. Give the Democrats your money, the emails say, and they’ll show those gender warriors it doesn’t pay to mess with Mother Nature, or any other female, for that matter.
I’d rather hear from the Nigerians with unclaimed millions in African banks than from anyone remotely associated with the Democratic campaign that insists women are the key to victory in 2012. At least at some point there was probably some money in some African bank. The last time women picked a federal government men didn’t want was the midterm election of Bill Clinton in 1996. And that was within the margin of error.
It’s probably not entirely the Campaign Committee’s fault. It takes a real imaginative leap to be a Beltway player and not believe the Washington Post and the New York Times when they tell you Republican misogyny is the Dems’ ticket to reelection. It’s not just an errant opinion column here and there, it’s a deafening drumbeat of wishful thinking. So many women, so many votes. On March 10, the Times “reported” that centrist women were disenchanted with Republicans. Within a day, a front page Times headline proclaimed, “Obama Plans Big Effort to Build Support Among Women.”
When actual pollsters sniffed around, the same week, they found that women were moving away from their erstwhile defenders at the Democratic estrogen-fest — even as the birth control debate was at its height. A CBS/NYT poll showed that while most women recognized the birth control ban as an issue of women’s health, women respondents nonetheless favored allowing employers to opt out on moral or religious grounds. If the New York Times had sampled women’s opinions other than by asking its 2012 friends and families it might have noticed the distinct lack of disenchantment with the Republicans among centrist women. Once in a while women affect elections. In the Alabama and Mississippi primaries last week, they formed the overwhelming majority of support for that well-known woman’s champion Rick Santorum.
The polls were a little weird. But they conform to a dispiriting insight. The Republicans don’t have a woman problem. It’s the Democrats who have the woman problem. Women aren’t fickle. Despite 30 years of trying (the gender gap first surfaced in polling in 1980) women don’t identify with the Democrats in numbers large enough to offset the Republicans’ overwhelming popularity with men. Democrats can’t even win a majority of white women in national elections. Legal abortion didn’t do it. At the moment even such a retrograde program as opposing contraception isn’t changing the numbers. If not birth control, then what? Breast cancer? The Violence Against Women Act?
There is no magic potion to unleash the mythic power of the female voter. As historian Michael Kazin so brilliantly describes in his book on the left, “American Dreamers,” like many liberal American social movements, feminism changed people’s behaviors and their beliefs about behavior. But, for a majority of female voters uninflected by race, feminism did not change their beliefs about the legitimate distribution of political power. Most women don’t grow up thinking they’re entitled to govern. Judging from their electoral behavior, most white women don’t care if the men they elect hope to deprive them of health insurance that includes birth control, if not keep them barefoot and pregnant. And without the jet fuel of anger and resentment, no social movement has ever changed elections.
I’m a pundit, so I will say that Barack Obama will probably win the 2012 election. He may even be the first president to win even while losing among men, technically a gender victory. (In 2008, the men split almost exactly in half.) But it will not be an estrogen tsunami, no matter how many hysterical emails the DCCC sends to hapless female Democrats out here in cyberspace.
(Credit: iStockphoto/lisafx) 
(Credit: AP/Salon) 
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama (Credit: AP) 
Clarence Thomas, George W. Bush and Antonin Scalia (Credit: AP) 
A couple waits to be wed at New Hampshire's Statehouse in Concord in January 1, 2010. (Credit: AP/Cheryl Senter) 
(Credit: Stuart Monk via Shutterstock) 