Alarmed by a gender gap that seriously threatens the Republican ticket, GOP leaders are handing women a celebrity role at this week's convention.
But podium appearances by an impressive roster of prominent Republican women--including a keynote address tomorrow by Rep. Susan Molinari, R-N.Y.--may do little to offset what has become a big ``woman problem'' for the GOP.
Polls indicate that Republican challenger Robert Dole trails President Clinton by as much as 27 percentage points among women voters. While women have tilted toward the Demo- crats for as long as 15 years, never has the gender gap yawned this wide in a presidential race.
``If this gap continues, it could very well be that women are the deciding factor in this election,'' Debbie Walsh, acting director of Rutgers University's Center for the American Woman and Politics, said.
Leaders from both parties are aggressively wooing women voters, but for Republicans, the courtship has taken on special urgency. GOP officials have set out to ensure that this week's convention, in particular, conveys a message that's appealing to women. Besides choosing Molinari as their keynoter, convention organizers have assigned plum speaking roles to Rep. Jennifer B. Dunn, R-Wash., Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio, and New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, among others.
Hutchison and Dunn also are spearheading a nationwide effort to identify 1.5 million new women voters by November and urge them to vote Republican. They are national chairwoman and co- chairwoman, respectively, of a drive (dubbed ``Fighting Back to Close the Gap'') organized by the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW), an affiliate of the Republican National Committee.
Republicans point out that the gender gap cuts both ways. President Clinton trails Dole among male voters, for example, by an estimated 10 per cent. Conservatives also insist that the party's hard-line anti-abortion stance (the platform calls for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortions in all circumstances) is not what's driving women away.
``My opinion of the gender gap is that it is real, but it has nothing to do with abortion,'' Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative Eagle Forum, said. ``Republicans mishandled [the] medicare [issue], and there are a lot of very senior women who are very nervous about medicare.'' Schlafly also noted that polls show support for abortion rights is actually stronger among men than among women.
Polls also indicate that abortion ranks far behind the economy, education, crime and health care in its importance to women voters. A bigger problem for Republicans may be that women appear to link Dole with a Republican-controlled 104th Congress that they perceive as too eager to dismantle the government safety net.
``I think women feel economically insecure, even in times of good economic forecasts,'' said Walsh, of the Center for the American Woman and Politics. ``I think that women feel personally closer to the edge of economic insecurity than men. And I think the talk about withdrawing economic security nets strikes closer to home [for women], and they are uneasy about it.''
In San Diego, many moderate Republican women also complain that their party has been taken over by social conservatives. ``John and Jane Republican are really frightened by the ideological rigidity of the extreme Right,'' said Anne Findlay Patton, co-chairwoman of the Republican Task Force of the San Diego Women's Political Caucus, an affiliate of the Washington- based, nonpartisan National Women's Political Caucus.
But while abortion may not be the biggest issue hurting Dole among women, it has escalated into a serious problem. To Patton and other moderates, the prime example of conservatives' hold on the GOP is the victory by abortion opponents in last week's Platform Committee debate.
Dole's handling of the issue alienated women on both sides of the debate. He initially insisted on platform language stating the party's tolerance of diverse views on abortion. But, under pressure from social conservatives, he backed down. Instead the platform will include only an appendix of defeated amendments on various issues, including abortion.
The gender gap ``was already a smoldering fire,'' said Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick. ``But the oil that was thrown on top of it was the abortion issue.'' The flare-up could have been avoided, Fitzpatrick thinks, if Dole's stance had been firmer. ``Had he not misstepped on articulating his position on abortion and on finessing the platform language, all of this would have been a two-day story.''
The problem ``is not that Republicans want to restrict abortions,'' argues Candy L. Strait, a Republican delegate from New Jersey and a founder of the WISH List (Women in the Senate and House), a political action committee that supports Republican women who favor abortion rights. ``It's that you have Bob Dole, who opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother, running on a platform that wants to make abortions illegal in every instance. By changing his position on abortion, [Dole] magnifies the problem for himself.''
Republican strategists hope that Dole's new message of tax relief and economic growth will prove more compelling to women than do differences over abortion. ``We feel that if women understand that the women's issue is more than just the `Big A' question, that we'll be able to close that gap,'' NFRW president Marilyn R. Thayer said. ``And that's our mission.''
Even if this week's convention succeeds in giving Dole a bounce among women, however, the GOP's woman problem won't going away anytime soon. ``I think that the gender gap is a permanent feature of our politics,'' said analyst Karlyn H. Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. ``It's going to be a difficult problem for the Republicans.''
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