Sarah Palin. Meg Whitman. Carly Fiorina. Kay Bailey Hutchison. There are more, but for the first time in memory, there are actually too many to name and count without resorting to Google.
Republican women running for high office and being appointed to key positions are no longer the anomalies they once were. People are no longer surprised that GOP candidates increasingly happen to be female. And smart. And powerful.
Ok – there are some rather embarrassing Neanderthal exceptions. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews referred to former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as a “mail order bride” and somehow managed to stay on the air and keep his job. It’s nearly impossible to imagine him making such a remark about a liberal woman candidate. (And subsequently avoid getting pink slipped.) And who can forget Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) intimating that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was not qualified to make important decisions regarding the war on terror because she did not have children? By Boxer’s reasoning, Sarah Palin must be five times as qualified as Hillary Clinton, and Janet Reno should never have had decision-making authority over Elian Gonzalez or Waco. (Come to think of it, Boxer would probably be correct on both points, but not because of the number of children each woman had or didn’t have.)
Our slate of modern GOP women candidates and leaders are true feminists – not the cartoon character “feminists” of the Left who hijacked the term a generation ago. To be successful, inspiring and powerful leaders, these Republican women do not seem to feel an obligation to look like men, dress like men, talk like men or behave like men in order to lead and to attract both male and female voters of all ages. Their authenticity, confidence, competency and femininity liberates them from such silliness the Left has used to allegedly “help” women politically, professionally and personally.
Emerging GOP woman candidates aren’t playing second fiddle, either. They are going for the gold and those on the Left and their cheerleaders in the media simply can’t get their heads around that notion. Where are the powerful husbands upon whose political career coattails women are suppose to ride? Where are the famous political family names to carry them over the finish line? After all, isn’t that how so many female Democratic candidates scored their place at the table?
Lacking comfortable stereotypes to successfully pin on modern Republican women political leaders, the Left is stymied. The Thatcher-esque self-made women making up the slate of candidates and leaders coming out of the Republican ranks in recent years presents a challenge for Democrats and the media. They are mothers, grandmothers, wives, business leaders, citizen legislators and activists taking part in public discourse, running for office, and supporting conservative causes in a very natural and dynamic American tradition.
While Democrats divide, sub-divide, compartmentalize and label women to the point where Democratic women are compelled to first and foremost address so-called “women’s issues” as if American women live in an entirely separate country than men, Republicans don’t seem shackled to such marginalizing structural limitations. The war on terror, tax relief, fiscal conservatism, economic growth, job creation, and yes, education and health care all top the charts for GOP women as well as GOP men.
The prospects for Republican gains in Congress and across the board in 2010 and beyond are exciting, indeed. More exciting, but not shocking or surprising, is that Republican women are queued up to be a significant part of the upcoming elections. Voters genuinely want to hear from our women candidates.
Sarah Palin has no fewer than 1,070 invitations to speak as of this writing. In March, Fortune Magazine boasted former E-bay President and CEO Meg Whitman on its cover and queried, “Can Whitman Save California?” and recent polling shows former Hewlett-Packard chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina within four percentage points of Barbara Boxer in California – and she hasn’t even formally jumped into the Senate race (yet).
Republican women are breaking the old rules, and those on the Left who wrote those rules don’t like it one bit. But whether the Left likes it or not, these would-be ladies who lunch, are now ladies who lead.
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Cheri Jacobus, president of Capitol Strategies PR, has managed congressional campaigns, worked on Capitol Hill and is an adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management. She appears on CNN, MSNBC and FOX News as a GOP strategist and is a columnist at The Hill newspaper (www.thehill.com).
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