The Future is Female. And Republican (Mild Barf Alert)

“The mama grizzlies, they rear up, and if you thought pitbulls were tough, well, you don’t want to mess with the mama grizzlies” – Sarah Palin

I live and work in Hollywood, the capital of celebrity flameouts – Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey Jr, etc. My local Beverly Hills and Malibu courthouse and police stations are stakeouts for paparazzi, snapping well-known actors looking washed-out and hungover as they do the “perp walk“. As the world knows, the latest crash-dive has been performed by Mel Gibson, whose widely reported (though so far unauthenticated) tirade against his Russian girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva has gone madly viral and even penetrated the inner sanctum of his agency, which fired him on the Bad Samaritan principle of “kick a man when he’s down” and on the grounds that Gibson on tape supposedly screamed the “n” word, which might have offended the agents’ valuable African-American clients such as Denzel Washington and Spike Lee.

This being Hollywood, where sexism is the default mode, the agents – led by Ari Emanuel, brother of Barack Obama’s Iago, Rahm – did not bother to cite, or perhaps even think about, Gibson’s alleged physical assault against his girlfriend.

It’s economics. Male superstars make a heck of a lot more money than female actors. This, plus the historical fact that in the misogynist hearts of many studio executives, women just don’t count in life or at the box office (with the possible exception of Angelina Jolie). The time-worn mantra I’ve heard so many times is, “Women don’t open”, meaning a female-oriented movie is a money loser in the first two crucial weeks.

But outside the movieland bubble, an upsurging counter-revolution in gender politics means that more and more women, and rightwingers at that, have become a fact of American political life. This is especially true of anti-feminist but gender-proud Republican women who, led by “mama grizzly” Sarah Palin, are coming on like gangbusters.

This year, there are 239 female candidates running for Congress, rivalling 1992's “Year of the Woman”. They are spitting mad, motivated by dark psychic energy, typically ultra-reactionary – but increasingly effective on the campaign trail. All of last month’s big primary races were won by women – Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman (California), Nikki Haley (South Carolina), the Neanderthal cave woman Sharron Angle (Nevada) and a lone Democrat, Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas), who beat off a challenge from a liberal Democrat man.

Traditionally, women Republicans have played an important but backseat role in party politics. We haven’t yet produced an American Margaret Thatcher … but it may happen sooner than you think.

Despite – or because of – her Snopes-like family dramas (Yes! You heard it here: Bristol and Levi are re-engaged and may get married on a TV reality show!), Sarah Palin has become a serious player, notwithstanding the late-night Letterman/Leno/Colbert/Jon Stewart jokes. Radiating sexy self-confidence, she is behaving imperiously as what she has grown into: a queen- and king-maker in almost every state that has an impending primary or general election. Most recently, that was in South Carolina where her soundbites helped a scandal-plagued, long-shot candidate, Nikki Haley, to the winner’s circle. Candidates, even mainstream Republicans, vie and die for her Facebook endorsement.

But even if Palin didn’t exist, a new breed of essentially anti-feminist feminists is running for office – and gunning to occupy the White House. And – to be blunt – many of them, like Palin herself and Minnesota’s congresswoman, wild and wacky Michele Bachmann (who blames swine flu on Obama), are enviably telegenic. Bella Abzug is your mother’s feminist; this is a new species entirely – groomed, in every sense, for success.

Here in California, two extremely rich conservative corporate women, Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett-Packard CEO, and Meg Whitman, of eBay fame, are running against old-style liberals, senator Barbara Boxer and former governor and current attorney general Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown. Whitman, fourth richest woman in California, has already spent a stunning $91m of her personal fortune to win the Republican primary. She is flooding the state with smart TV ads, as is Fiorina, whose “Jobs First!” campaign downplays her corporate record of firing workers and outsourcing jobs to China and India. Jerry Brown, meanwhile, is running a lazy laidback campaign, counting on previous name recognition – he’s also the son of a former popular governor. Boxer has the power (and money) of incumbency, but she is battling for a fourth six-year term at a time when anti-incumbency is the national mood.

This upsurge in Republican feminism of a brutal sort exalts mommyhood but ignores issues that most directly affect women. We’re lightyears away from yesteryear’s GOP women’s clubs, the Goldwater and Reagan conservative ladies, who, on occasion, championed the Equal Rights Amendment but then allowed the movement to slip into the hands of theocrats and pistol-packin’ mamas. The new breed of grizzly is here to stay. And, as I learned from my years in the United Kingdom, watching in horrified admiration as Margaret Thatcher wiped the floor with her male opposition, there’s nothing so powerful as a really angry woman.

The Future is Female. And hyper-inflated by Big Brother and Big Momma.

“Academics have long pondered why the government started growing precisely when it did. The federal government, aside from periods of wartime, consumed about 2 percent to 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) up until World War I. It was the first war that the government spending didn’t go all the way back down to its pre-war levels, and then, in the 1920s, non-military federal spending began steadily climbing. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal — often viewed as the genesis of big government — really just continued an earlier trend. What changed before Roosevelt came to power that explains the growth of government? The answer is women’s suffrage.

For decades, polls have shown that women as a group vote differently than men. Without the women’s vote, Republicans would have swept every presidential race but one between 1968 and 2004.

The gender gap exists on various issues. The major one is the issue of smaller government and lower taxes, which is a much higher priority for men than for women. This is seen in divergent attitudes held by men and women on many separate issues. Women were much more opposed to the 1996 federal welfare reforms, which mandated time limits for receiving welfare and imposed some work requirements on welfare recipients. Women are also more supportive of Medicare, Social Security and educational expenditures.

Studies show that women are generally more risk averse than men. Possibly, this is why they are more supportive of government programs to ensure against certain risks in life. Women’s average incomes are also slightly lower and less likely to vary over time, which gives single women an incentive to prefer more progressive income taxes. Once women become married, however, they bear a greater share of taxes through their husbands’ relatively higher income. In that circumstance, women’s support for high taxes understandably declines.

Marriage also provides an economic explanation for men and women to prefer different policies. Because women generally shoulder most of the child-rearing responsibilities, married men are more likely to acquire marketable skills that help them earn money outside the household. If a man gets divorced, he still retains these skills. But if a woman gets divorced, she is unable to recoup her investment in running the household. Hence, single women who believe they may marry in the future, as well as married women who most fear divorce, look to the government as a form of protection against this risk from a possible divorce: a more progressive tax system and other government transfers of wealth from rich to poor.

The more certain a woman is that she doesn’t risk divorce, the more likely she is to oppose government transfers.”

http://johnrlott.tripod.com/op-eds/WashTimesWomensSuff112707.html

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