Before Hillary, There Was Liddy Dole

Now that Bob Dole has the nomination pinned to his lapel like a campaign button, may I suggest he drop the “little wife” thing? You know, the bit where he says of Liddy, “When she is first lady, she will not be in charge of health care.”

I know it’s been a real crowd-pleaser in the primaries, a thigh-slapper among the red-meat, angry-man contingent of the Republican Party. It’s a routine in which the accomplished Liddy Dole shows how she’s accomplished the wifely smile that says, “Oh, he didn’t mean it that way.”

But for every applause he registered on the hate-Hillary meter, there is an unrecorded wince among women who know a put-down when they hear one. Running Liddy as the un-Hillary, running Bob as the anti-Hillary, is a bad act.

For one thing, Bob Dole isn’t like that. Nor is Liddy Dole. Nor is their marriage. Nor is this subliminal tack against the uppityness of the president’s partner going to help with the women voters who are more up for grabs than the Democrats like to believe.

Liddy Dole makes the most unlikely un-Hillary since Marilyn Quayle. Liddy and Hillary were both class presidents, both law school graduates. They’re both intense, religious, driven perfectionists. Only Liddy was there first.

Liddy and Bob, the Cabinet secretary and the Senate leader, were the power couple for whom the term co-presidency was first invented. In the old days, they got the biggest applause lines when introduced as a Dole-Dole ticket. And while Liddy is his closest adviser, Dole has more women in his innermost circle than the president.

If Liddy has learned anything from watching the hatcheting of Hillary it’s that she’d rather keep her day job at the Red Cross. Bob Dole is going to need some of the votes of those wincing women if he plans to get to the White House.

These are the women who are avoiding the Republican primary. The female share of the primary electorate was expected to be about 53 percent. But only 45.5 percent of the Republican voters in Iowa were women, only 44 percent in New Hampshire and 41 percent in New York. That’s not just a gender gap. That’s an enthusiasm gap.

Let’s go back to those wonderful yesteryears of 1992 and 1994. The difference between the Clinton “mandate” and Gingrich “sweep” wasn’t just the much-heralded angry white men who went Republican, but the unenthusiastic women who stayed home. The women’s share of the vote dropped a critical 2-1/2 percent. They were 56 percent of the nonvoters.

As Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick says, “The gender gap is no more a permanent political fixture than anything else in politics.” To win, Republicans are going to have to attract the women on the fence, including what the pollsters like to call - in one of those wonderfully ambiguous phrases - suburban swing women.

They are also going to have to change the party image. When asked in one poll what springs to mind when they hear the word Republican, women offered up words like “white men,” “old men” and “rich men.” And just plain “men.”

Dole has problems in that department. He’s stuck with an anti-abortion plank that three-quarters of his own party would like to get rid of. He’s stuck with Ralph Reed and the crowd who want him to pick a more conservative running mate - bye-bye, Christie Whitman. And he’s stuck with Pat Buchanan, who threatens to turn the San Diego convention into a sequel of “Dallas: The Attack on the Uppity Woman.”

There’s a lot more to the women’s vote than first lady politics but women are, um, sensitive to symbolism.

As a role model, may I suggest Bill Weld, the Republican who squeaked into the Massachusetts governor’s chair with the help of those female suburban swingers. Now running for the Senate, the savvy Weld not only refused to trash the first lady, he offered to “be a character witness for Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

Bob Dole might choke on those words. But frankly, I’d like to see a campaign that appealed to women on economic substance rather than first lady symbolism. I’d like Dole to stop saying who isn’t going to be in charge of health care and tell us who is, and what he plans to do about health care. But first he has to stop dissing the distaff.

Remember what suffragist Susan B. Anthony said? “No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party who ignores her sex.” Susan B. was a Republican.

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