What's up with Women for Obama

I'm convinced - we've GOT to engage women if Obama is to win, especially in Virginia. So what does that actually mean to me - or you, reader? How do I help, given the narrow circle in which I move - liberal Democrats, good jobs, educated, fairly well-off, secular? They're already for Obama. (And as of last week, Obama had a double-digit lead among female voters.)

What's the problem? I think it's that there's a certain lack of enthusiasm for Obama (remember the crazy Obama fervor four years ago?) and that Romney is starting to sound intelligent and fluent as he moves into the general election. Where do we start?

Let's think about "women" - Hillary and Palin, for example. As Obama said recently, "women are not some monolithic block. Women are not an interest group." There's no stereotypical "woman." We have to talk woman-to-woman, putting forward our best arguments, not assuming there's a "women's vote" or simplistically thinking there are "women's issues."

Good ideas from Melinda Henneberger, writing in the Washington Post about "Five myths about female voters."

The first myth: "women vote together."

White, married, rural and suburban women have been trending Republican for years. In fact, white women as a whole haven’t gone Democratic since 1964. While for single, highly educated and urban women, the opposite is true; those remain reliably Democratic demographics.

Second myth: female voters favor female candidates.

Women consistently say they’d prefer to vote for a woman. But once in the voting booth, they don’t automatically favor female candidates... In fact, women are insulted by appeals that suggest they automatically favor female candidates, which is part of the reason [Hillary] Clinton didn’t play the gender card too overtly through much of the [2008] campaign. Younger women in particular find this “hammer, meet nail” approach offensive. That’s why you rarely hear female candidates in either party making that pitch.

Obama won younger women’s votes, while Hillary Clinton captured women over 65 and barely won a majority of women.

Third myth: women vote based on "women's issues, such as abortion rights and contraception."
We don't although women are more more likely than men to rate government policy on birth control as important - 55% to 35% in a recent USA Today-Gallup poll Melinda quotes. In a Gallup poll last year, women are divided on abortion - 49-45%. Melinda comments (and this is really hard to believe, considering 1 in 3 women will have an abortion at some time in her life):

Age and party affiliation are far better predictors than gender of views on abortion.

Myth 4. A candidate’s wife can deliver women’s votes. She can't.

And, finally, myth 5: men decide elections. This is BIG and we need to remember it and tell everyone.

While it’s true that women tune in to campaigns later than men, women turn out to vote in greater numbers — and have done so for decades. Since 1980, the proportion of women who vote has topped the proportion of men who do. And it was higher than ever in 2008, with 65.7 percent of eligible women voting, compared with 61.5 percent of men.

Here's the link:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-female-voters/2012/04/20/gIQAo0y1VT_story.html?tid=carousel 

Virginia's Gyno-Warriors
See you at United Against the War on Women! April 28 in Richmond!


Bob McDonnell and the Republicans have made Virginia a high-profile player in the War on Women. Although the governor backed down on requiring a pre-abortion vaginal probe (aka, state-mandated rape), he fully supported humiliating women with a medically unnecessary, nonconsensual, expensive abdominal ultrasound as a precondition to a legal abortion. This measure and others revealed a frightening disrespect, even contempt for women. Virginia Republicans to be active participants in the national election strategy to win by appealing to sexism and misogyny.


Anti-women bills are a Republican priority. At the top of their agenda has been 1) excluding all coverage of abortion in the new health care law (including allowing hospitals to refuse to admit pregnant women with a life-threatening condition), 2) restricting contraceptive coverage in that law (putting the demands of religiously affiliated institutions that take public funds and serve the public above women’s health care), and 3) defunding the highly regarded national family planning program, including Planned Parenthood clinics. Accordingly, Virginia excluded abortion coverage (except in cases of rape, incest and life endangerment) from the new health insurance exchange and regularly attempts to defund Planned Parenthood. Contraceptive coverage may be next.


While still working on the master strategy of overturning Roe v. Wade, the Republicans’ daily tactic is to “chip away” at services. Two pointless Virginia measures would have done that – an unconstitutional ban on abortion after 20 weeks’ gestation and a ban on Medicaid funds for abortions in the case of a fetus who will not survive. The Medicaid ban was not only cruel, it made no sense. In the last fiscal year only 23 women received state funds to terminate a pregnancy because of a fetal anomaly, costing the Commonwealth less than $15,000. “Chipping away” includes the unnecessary clinic regulations adopted last year, requiring women’s clinics providing first-trimester abortions to meet hospital standards. The intent is to force clinics to close.


Nationally, the most extreme factions back personhood measures, giving full legal rights to a fertilized egg. Virginia’s personhood bill failed when Republicans could not figure out how it could possibly work (the word “person” is defined 118 ways and used some 25,000 times in the Virginia Code) but it will be back.


Some national trends have not yet trickled down to Virginia, but chances are they will. The reason is that the National Right to Life Committee and other national organizations that develop legislation make sure it gets into the hands of state legislators who will fight for it. Among bills to watch for is the racist Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), which would criminalize abortions for sex-selection and race-selection – despite the fact there is zero evidence of this. Again, the intent is to shut down clinics.



The Republican “warriors” may have gone too far. (Current “joke” – next they’ll require women to paint the nursery and pick the name before an abortion.) Women’s rights supporters can help persuade independent and Republican women to vote for pro-women Democrats by showing how out-of-touch Republicans are. Women need to know that Democrats will fight to defend reproductive health services.