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Friday, August 22, 2008

So how dumb...and how vindictive...are women voters going to be?
Posted by Jill | 5:51 AM
Dahlia Lithwick in Slate notes that as badly as John McCain is polling with women, it gets worse once they realize that he wants to do everything he can to make sure that women of reproductive age don't get to control what happens to their bodies; that government will:

A quick look at the polls reflects McCain's problem: He's running behind Obama with women voters. A poll released yesterday by Emily's List has Obama beating McCain by a 12-point margin among all registered female voters and by 30 points among registered female voters ages 18 to 27. A February Planned Parenthood poll of 1,205 women voters in 16 battleground states found that 49 percent of women who backed McCain did so despite being pro-choice, and 46 percent backing him also wanted Roe v. Wade to remain the law of the land. It's clear that once these voters find out McCain's real record on reproductive rights, they flee. The problem, as Sarah Blustain points out in this great piece, is that voters don't seem to be finding out.

McCain needs these pro-choice women, but every time he tries to reach out to them, he gets smacked upside the head by his base. When he floated the notion of naming a pro-choice vice president last week—either former Pennsylvania Gov. and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge or Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman—Rush Limbaugh snarled that "if the McCain camp does that, they will have effectively destroyed the Republican Party and put the conservative movement in the bleachers." Limbaugh also pledged that tapping Lieberman or Ridge would "ensure [McCain's] defeat." So McCain needs to keep his base happy—and the rest of us in the dark.


[snip]

John McCain is banking on his reputation as an independent maverick to snooker voters into thinking that his abortion views are centrist, no matter what he actually says. It's a risky strategy: Don't believe what I say. Believe what you used to believe before I opened my mouth. But that's where the Jessica Seinfeld trick comes in. Your kid eats the meatloaf because it looks like a meatloaf. And voters continue to think McCain is a maverick because he looks like one.

Voters, and especially women voters who want to make their own reproductive decisions, need to wake up and smell the asparagus.



The correct answer to the question about abortion is the one that was part of what Barack Obama said at Saddleback last week: "I trust women to make their own decisions." Anything less is to diminish women as fully-fledged human beings and citizens.

With the Bush Administration preparing to allow health care providers to refuse to provide contraception, the provision of which constitutes ACCEPTED AND LEGAL MEDICAL PRACTICE, on the basis of their "conscience", this becomes much larger than simply the abortion issue. It's a question of whether American women are human beings and citizens of the United States with the same rights of self-determination as men do. John McCain believes that they are not. And women need to know that, and vote accordingly. I don't care how disappointed they are about Hillary Clinton (who, along with Sen. Patty Murray, has at least TRIED to keep this repulsive rule from taking effect).

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9 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Obama's been very busy tossing women under the bus all summer; his pandering to evangelicals who will never vote for him at the expense of pro-choice women is worrisome. Add in the FISA cave-in and I've already moved left.

I was not a Clinton supporter, so that's not my issue. It's that I'm not going to vote against my own interests.
8/22/08, 6:39 AM  
Blogger merlallen said...
tata, where did you get the idea he was pandering. and stop with the under the bus bullshit, please? I'm sure you were going to vote for McBush anyway.
8/22/08, 7:21 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Your threatening tone rings hollow. My politics are slightly to the left of Gandhi's.

I got the idea he was pandering because I listened when he talked.
8/22/08, 7:57 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
McCain can pick a pro-choice running mate and I don't think it'll effect his chances much. No group goosesteps like the wingnuts and after a week of bitching, they'll figure out some other reason not to vote for the black man. Remember, they weren't going to ever vote for McCain 4 months ago. Hell, he could pick an abortion doctor and I'll bet they'll still vote for him. It's not that hard for them to put their "principled morals" on the shelf for a couple of months.

Obviously, I'll be voting for Obama.
8/22/08, 9:19 AM  
Blogger Citizen Carrie said...
I don't believe all that bull about McCain being some sort of independent maverick. He's a maverick only when he thinks he'll get some sort of short-term gain. If he was really concerned about women voters and had pro-choice sympathies, he'd be telling all the ditto-heads to go to hell.
8/22/08, 10:38 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Tata, I agree with you about the tossing and pandering, but I continue to be conflicted by this: how will not voting (or voting for someone other than Obama) protect (y)our own interests?

I am thinking specifically of the supreme court, and my fears are not exclusively for reproductive freedom, either.

Thanks in advance for your response.
8/22/08, 3:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
At the moment, there appear to be two possibilities: 1. McCain gets elected and the Supreme Court goes down the tubes for women, working people, the poor, etc.; 2. Obama gets elected and the Supreme Court goes down the tubes in the name of bipartisanship, which it has been doing since Reagan.
8/22/08, 4:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
In other words, since I can't stop the candidates from moving ever rightward and can't pretend to endorse that, I might as well vote for someone whose positions are closer to my own.
8/22/08, 4:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Yes, that makes perfect sense intellectually, and on principle. But practicaly, that scares me. I guess I don't want to believe that an Obama SC would, could, be as reactionary as a McCain SC. And at this moment in the race, if we all voted for someone other than Obama, McCain would win by default.

I should explain that I have been asking this question at several blogs where I usually lurk, and the response has been depressingly similar. Vote switches, or third-party votes, or not voting at all. It's hard to escape the feeling that no matter what we do, we're fucked. And so it goes.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, tata. And thank you, Jill, for a great blog.
8/22/08, 6:27 PM  
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