Dole Really Deserves Women’s Votes

What do women want in a president? Bob Dole packed the Republican National Convention with almost every answer he could think of in an effort to narrow the gender gap between himself and his Democratic opponent. Bill Clinton’s popularity with women accounts for almost all of the lead the president has had in the polls.

Do women want a president who understands the exhausting life of working mothers?

There was young Rep. Susan Molinari, R-N.Y., giving the keynote speech about how Dole had helped her establish herself in Congress and how well he understands beleaguered working women. Meanwhile, her beaming husband and her father took turns tending her 3-month-old daughter in the audience.

Do women want a president who isn’t threatened by a strong and successful wife?

What better credential than Elizabeth Dole, two-time Cabinet member and president of the American Red Cross?

Do women want a president who isn’t hounded by rumors of illicit affairs and questionable financial dealings, whose marriage is solid and whose physical courage is genuine?

Elizabeth Dole openly admires her husband enough to have made career sacrifices more than once to campaign for him.

Do women want to be strong and equal, recognized for their talents and leadership?

New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman got great TV exposure as she presided over the convention as deputy chairman, obviously at ease and competent.

Do women want a president who believes in family values?

The convention audience was full of babies placidly up past their bedtimes, many of them being cuddled competently by co-parenting fathers.

But the appeals to women that Dole doled out at the GOP convention weren’t just political flimflam. For decades, he has surrounded himself with strong and successful women whose careers he has boosted. Legislation he has backed shows he is not the stingy, mean-spirited old crank of his opponents’ caricatures.

Sheila Burke, Dole’s chief of staff, has been one of the most powerful staff members in Congress - at the same time she was the mother of three young children. Dole’s chief foreign-policy adviser and tax lawyers are women. So is his chief fund-raiser. All of those posts usually are filled by men, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

On the other hand, men predominate Clinton’s White House staff and his campaign organization.

Dole, notes The Wall Street Journal, helped start the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program which provides nourishing food for pregnant women and for children. He has pushed the federal commission that studied the glass ceiling which has kept women from reaching the top rungs of the corporate ladder. He also has helped raise millions of dollars to fight breast cancer and violence against women.

Republicans argue for reducing taxes and regulations on small businesses, millions of which are owned by women. Republicans are pushing tax reductions to help families, as well as family choice in schools, faster job creation, home ownership for low-income families and more state and local control over government. They indeed can make a strong case for women’s support.

But Dole’s position on abortion and the Republican Party platform’s uncompromising stance on that issue override everything else in Dole’s pro-women record in the minds of many pro-abortion-rights voters.

The fact is, however, that whatever the GOP platform says, little is going to change, like it or not, even if Republicans win the presidency and hold on to both houses of Congress. A constitutional amendment outlawing abortion isn’t going to be enacted. Women who have abortions aren’t going to be persecuted as criminals. The abortion pill RU-486 soon will be on the market, making the ending of a pregnancy more of a private matter.

Dole’s gender-gap problem is, in part, a matter of style rather than substance. He lacks the high-voltage charisma and easy affability which candidates need in this TV age. On the small screen, he does not project the warmth and compassion that those who know him or meet him in small groups insist he has.

Maybe it’s charisma and a talent for TV sound bites that women - and men - really want in a president. Maybe those attributes have become indispensable in the White House; maybe candidates who lack them can’t win, however distinguished their records and however sterling their character.

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