Women voters a battleground in 2004 election (Swing vote "soccer moms" are now "security moms"

ARLINGTON, Va. — Just 37 minutes before the National Organization for Women was to host a forum for Democratic presidential candidates here late Friday afternoon, the Bush administration did what friends and foes alike say it does best: befuddle its adversaries.

In this case, it was a three-page opinion from the federal Department of Education released at the curious time of 4:27 p.m. Friday upholding the basic provisions of Title IX, the federal law that expanded opportunities for female student athletes.

For more than a year, the law had been under review by a commission assembled by the Bush administration in response to conservative critics of the law arguing that Title IX hurt school sports programs for males.

Whether the timing of the Title IX opinion was deliberately calculated to undercut the NOW forum — the Education Department closed at 5 p.m., after which representatives could not be contacted for comment — its substance certainly came as a surprise to the hundreds of feminists in attendance.

They had been bracing for the worst from the Republican administration, and didn't get it.

"You don't think they were pandering, do you?" NOW President Kim Gandy quipped during an interview Saturday. "I guess George Bush — or more accurately (White House chief political adviser) Karl Rove — understands that they will need the vote of women to have any chance of winning re-election next year."

Indeed, if only women had voted in the 2000 presidential election, Democrat Al Gore would have won a landslide victory over Bush: 54 percent of females cast their ballots for him, while 43 percent voted for Bush.

Gore benefited from what political analysts call a "gender gap" in voting that has been a major part presidential politics since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980: women favoring Democrats by wide margins, men favoring Republicans by equally wide margins.

However, further analysis of the 2000 presidential detected what is now referred to as the "marriage gap" — a partisan divide that could be a major advantage for Bush in his re-election bid and attest to his ability to attract female voters, particularly wives and mothers. In 2000, only 44 percent of married voters of both genders supported Gore, compared with 57 percent of unmarried voters.

Fifty-six percent of married voters voted for Bush in 2000. And last month, a poll by former Clinton White House pollster Mark Penn found that if the presidential election were held this summer, Bush would once again win married voters by an even larger margin, 50-29, over a generic Democrat.

Moreover, Penn found that Bush has essentially achieved parity with Democrats in terms of women voters: the president was favored 42-41 percent over the generic Democrat in the poll — a stunning achievement for a party that has registered gender gaps of 21 percent over the last quarter century.

Even more daunting to the Democrats is the fact that the "soccer moms" — the term pollsters have long applied to the pivotal swing vote of suburban married women with children — have morphed into "security moms" since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Celinda Lake, one of the Democratic Party's most prominent pollsters on women's issues, told reporters at a briefing last week that she expects the impact of Sept. 11 on women to wane, eventually.

"I don't think there's ever been anyone better at attracting women voters among Republican presidents than George W. Bush . . . particularly the suburban women, the married women," Lake said.

But with growing concerns among women over the state of the economy, education and health care — all traditionally high on the list of concerns of women voters — the "gender gap is starting to re-emerge" in ways it has in the past, Lake added.

Still, "women will be a real battleground" in the 2004 election, she acknowledged.

That is why Bush is a "risk-taker" on a host of issues, said Ed Goeas, a veteran Republican pollster who frequently teams with Lake on "battleground" polls during presidential election years.

The Bush political machine "keeps the pipeline filled with issues," Goeas said during the same breakfast with reporters. The result is Democrats are "always reacting" to the president rather than getting ahead of him, Goeas added, "debating the means rather than the end."

The problem for the Democrats seeking the party's 2004 president nomination is even more complex, however.

Women, mostly liberal activists of the kind that make up NOW's membership, account for nearly 60 percent of the vote in Democratic primaries. So most of the candidates must pursue these voters in a way that does not move their campaigns too far to the left and alienate moderates, the swing voters in the general election.

"Yes, if Republicans do not expand their constituency, they will suffer at the ballot box, but the same can be said for Democrats," Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster, writes in the current issue of the Brookings Institution's "Review" periodical. "For instance, if the Democrats continue to lose ground among union households, white males and stay-at-home moms, they will forever be the minority party."

In fact, according to Gandy, the only major candidate going all-out for the support of women in the Democratic Party is former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, the only top-tier candidate to participate in NOW's the organization's candidate forum Friday evening.

All nine, though, have a stump speech to women's groups built around dire warnings of lost abortion rights if Bush is re-elected and given the opportunity to fill as many as three seats on the U.S. Supreme Court.

And "that is where the pedal hits the metal," said Gandy. "We have two branches already aligned against us, and the Supreme Court is precariously balanced. Women's rights are in greater peril than they've been in over a decade."

Long, green arm of the law

A handful of the largest environmental organizations have increased their revenue by more than one-third, since the 2000 election, expressly for the purpose of beating George Bush in the 2004 election.

The League of Conservation Voters doubled its revenue between 1999 and 2001, while the Sierra Club tripled its revenue, according to IRS records. LCV president Deb Callahan says the 2004 election will be the most important election in the history of the green movement.

Leaders of these same environmental organizations virtually ran the Clinton-Gore administration. A few of the more conspicuous:

LCV president Bruce Babbitt, who was interior secretary under Clinton;
Wilderness Society contributed Alice Rivlin, budget director, and George Frampton, chief of the Fish and Wildlife Service;
World Wildlife Fund provided Thomas E. Lovejoy, a "scientific adviser," to the Department of Interior;
World Resources Institute offered three people: Gustave Speth, who served on the transition team, and then moved to the U.N. Development Program, as well as Rafe Pomerance and Jessica Tuchman Mathews, both of whom became deputy secretaries of state;
Sierra Club Legislative Director David Gardiner joined the planning department at the EPA;
National Audubon Society's Brooks Yeager, a policy analyst for Department of Interior;
Natural Resources Defense Council's John Leshy, solicitor of the Department of Interior.
Once inside the government, these people hired other environmental organization leaders to fill middle-management, and field positions throughout the various agencies. These middle-management types are protected by civil service rules, and many are still at work inside the Bush administration.

No wonder the Clinton-Gore administration advanced the extreme green agenda. No wonder the green extremists are so desperate to get rid of George Bush, who disrupted their use of the government to advance their extreme agenda.

Now, these same environmental organizations have the audacity to charge the Bush administration of being "in the pocket" of corporate polluters, when it is they who polluted the government for eight years.

The green extremists are desperate. They are using their new money to organize at the local level in key states, such as Florida and New Mexico. They will not rely simply on TV ads; they are arranging community workshops and get-out-the-vote programs. Winning is the goal, and any means to that end is acceptable.

Propaganda is still their most potent weapon. When the Bush administration edited an EPA report to remove references to global warming predictions developed during the Clinton-Gore era, the greens cried "censorship," and newspapers across the country amplified their charge. The predictions were omitted because, since they were developed, they have been subsequently disavowed by scientists around the world, as fatally flawed numbers that bear no resemblance to reality.

In their propaganda, however, these same environmental organizations censor the scientific data that disproves the catastrophic claims they continue to make. Even as the fires continue to destroy the forests that their anti-logging policies were said to protect, the greens ignore scientific facts, and the truth, in order to point the finger of blame at Bush, claiming that his goal is to reward loggers with profits from public lands.

These people are dangerous. Their goal is control. They have successfully used the environment as an excuse to impose all kinds of regulations to bring society under the control of central government authority – which they expect to implement once more, after Bush is defeated. They will stop at nothing.

These green extremist organizations are fueled by dozens of huge, left-leaning foundations, by federal grants, and by misguided individuals who continue to believe their propaganda.

Opponents of their government-enforced, worship-the-earth policies are at a disadvantage, because they have no giant foundations to provide funding, and they disdain federal grants. While the Ford Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts are only two of dozens of foundations that fund green extremists, the tiny Paragon Foundation is almost alone in its efforts to encourage property rights and resource use organizations.

The 2004 elections may well be the most important in the history of the green movement. If they are successful in recapturing the government, a renewal of the Clinton-Gore surrender to global governance will surely follow, as will the continuation of laws and regulations that abolish private property rights and the continuation of ever-tightening government control over every facet of human life.

... even more daunting to the Democrats is the fact that the "soccer moms" — the term pollsters have long applied to the pivotal swing vote of suburban married women with children — have morphed into "security moms" since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

This is the most optimistic belief that conservatives try to nuture into reality. It is based on the shakey premise that “soccermoms” now follow candidates closely and have a new interest in politics and the military.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. 80% of women voters vote with their emotions over logic. In 2000, they didn't like Bush but Gore made them think of Herman Munster on his wedding night.

They just decided not to vote... plain and simple. If given the opportunity of voting for the rapist/traitor in 2000, they would have.

So far, the dem dog-and-pony show fails to push their buttons like Billy-boy did. The fully-coiffed Kerry seems OK... but he just doesn't meet their “emotional” qualifications... he lacks pinache.

Now Hillary is another subject. “Smartest woman in the world” who has lived in the whitehouse, crusaded for socialist healthcare, “loves” children and is a “victim” of her husbands sexual deviances.

When Nov. 2004 arrives, Hillary Rodham-Clinton will be there for the “soccermoms”... and they will swoon to her searing logic. National security, common sense and political substance be damned!

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