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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Laura Flanders talks about her book "Bushwomen," and why the media has given a free pass to Condi Rice, Christie Whitman, Elaine Chao and the other women who've put a pretty face on ugly policies.
Apr 12, 2004 | In this election year, there are so many books crowding the shelves that expose the crimes of the Bush administration, it hardly seems as if there's room for another. But while by now we're all pretty familiar with the alleged lies and shady dealings of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and company, some of us might be less acquainted with the policies and personalities of the female Bushies.
Laura Flanders, public radio personality and author of "Real Majority, Media Minority," takes a look at the backgrounds and policies of such women as Condoleezza Rice, Elaine Chao and Christine Todd Whitman in her new book, "Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species." This informative and entertaining investigation serves up the types of profiles Flanders believes the mainstream media has failed to provide; Laura Bush, Lynne Cheney, Karen Hughes, Ann Veneman, Gale Ann Norton and Katherine Harris also come under scrutiny, from their childhoods to their business backgrounds to the way they've cast a feminist gloss on two brutal wars. Does the Bush administration use its ambitious and successful women to put a kinder face on its cruel policies? Flanders thinks so. Women voters are a crucial group in the upcoming presidential election; will they be convinced to vote for Bush by his cadre of likable, smooth-talking female aides and Cabinet members?
Flanders spoke to Salon from San Francisco about the media's failure to expose these women's true backgrounds, Condoleezza Rice's relationship with Chevron, and how Karen Hughes figured out that looking at the world in simple good vs. evil terms was crucial to President Bush's success.
Your general point in the book is that the Bush administration has used women to put a sweeter face on some upsetting policies. How do they do this exactly? And is there any proof that Americans fall for it?
What first initiated my interest in this subject was watching what happened in January 2001, when the Bush administration came into office with the minority of the popular vote and the slimmest proportion of African-American support of any president in half a century. Their job was to articulate that the Republican Party was going to reunify the country, bring everyone together, and really represent the nation. The president's naming of the Cabinet secretaries was a big part of sending that message -- five women, two African-Americans, one Hispanic, one Asian-American, one Arab-American, a Democrat. This got applause in the media. The New York Times talked about George Bush putting forth a governing team every bit as ethnically and racially diverse as President Clinton's. "A rainbow" was the description a guest used on CNN. So it worked, with respect to the media.
Did it work among the population? Well, it's hard to tell. But I do think the compassionate conservative facade worked, in that it took several months to see statistics showing real dissatisfaction among women voters. By August of 2001, Bush's support among women and moderate voters was way down in the doldrums, some of the lowest statistics in a decade. But in the first days, I think it did help, yes.
And now, after Sept. 11 and two wars, does Bush have more women supporters?
The polls that I've looked at show John Kerry leading by a predictable 10 or 11 percent among women. There is a gender gap and it's been there since 1980 -- women have preferred Democrats for president. The point is that in this election coming up, every swing voter will count. There is no constituency more unspoken for than moderate women, particularly married suburban women. Increasingly we're hearing about unmarried single women being a critical voting block.
Just this last weekend we had the Bush campaign sending out press releases about what the victories -- the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq -- have brought for women and how women should be grateful for what Bush has done for women in those countries. I think there is a conscious effort out there to make that pitch because this is a huge group -- women vote more than men.
Which is obviously why you've decided to zero in on the women in his administration, assuming that American women are responding to them. This is a problem the Republicans have worried about for a long time, right?
Oh, yes. They've been concerned about it since the 1980 election when they thought that pandering to male fears of female equality and civil rights wouldn't do them much harm, and that women would vote like their husbands. It didn't happen. You saw this large "gender canyon" -- as the Emily's List people call it -- with women abandoning the Republican Party in droves. You've seen a change in that, in the last decade or so, white women have actually voted majority Republican. It's women of color, particularly African-American women, who give Democratic candidates the edge.
This is contested territory, and it's territory that the Democrats used to have sewn up because they were the party of reproductive rights, of the Equal Rights Amendment, they supported the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But they backed away from that. They dropped the ERA off the platform in the late '80s. I think that the Democratic Party has some work to do to really win women solidly to their side, just as the Republicans have a lot of work to do. But I'd say that the Republicans have been doing a good amount of work.
You have some research in the book that showed that one of the solutions the Republicans came up with was just that they should hire more women.
In August of 2001, when those nasty statistics I was talking about came out, the White House invited magazine editors and publishers to meet the officeholders. They announced they were going to spend millions of dollars on a new campaign called "Winning Women" that was going to profile Hughes, Whitman, Rice, etc. The woman who's the co-chair of the RNC, Ann Wagner, a 38-year-old suburban mom -- her description exactly fits the demographic they're aiming for. In summer of 2003, the GOP effort in California to unseat Gov. Gray Davis also featured a lot of women on the campaign trail. We found some memos [suggesting] that was a key part of their strategy. It was important for them to use the opportunity to present an image of diverse Republican women. They're no fools. They know they're not going to win the presidency if their constituency continues to be men, and white male Southerners at that.
Let's go back to the question of the media. You say that in the profiles of these "Bushwomen," journalists tend to write about their makeup and clothing and less about their background. But then again, you also cite media articles that go into the women's background, so the information must be out there.
Of course; there's been some excellent stuff done, but the rest of the stuff has been so startling. After Condoleezza Rice is appointed national security advisor, she's coming to office having directed an oil company and managed a multimillion-dollar university and served as a Sovietologist in the White House at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. She's taking on the top national security post in the Cabinet, and what did the New York Times talk about? It talked about her hair, her hemline and her place of birth. The fact of her policy positions or attitudes toward security didn't come up until the 27th paragraph of this long, soft feature. You just wouldn't see the same treatment given Dick Cheney.
Is this true of profiles of women in general, not just women politicians?
I think there's a pattern. We do tend to see softer features on women in public office than we would see of men. It's not always true -- the treatment that Hillary Clinton received was very rough, the treatment of [1984 Democratic vice presidential nominee] Geraldine Ferraro was very tough. But for a crew that have between them half a century of expertise in critical areas of U.S. policy, this group of women have received remarkably scant attention.
Instead, we're getting stereotypes, the type of stories that the White House plays to. For example, [Secretary of Labor] Elaine Chao, who says, "I've come to this country as an immigrant from China." She doesn't exactly mislead the public, but when she says, "I came to this country not speaking a word of English," it sets off a preexisting narrative in the public's mind that summons to mind images of sweatshops and Chinese takeout -- which is just not her personal experience! She grew up in a well-to-do shipping magnate's family, her father benefited from opening trade with China, she went to Mount Holyoke and took a golf class. Fair enough, that was her experience, but let's get the details so we're not off thinking that she has credentials to bring to her job that she doesn't in fact have.
Also, there seems to be this assumption that because they're women they're going to be looking out for women. You point out that's not necessarily the case.
No, this whole con job, this presenting of a multiculti facade, works in our media to suggest that something is enlightened about this administration's social and economic policy. In fact, integration in the halls of power, in the beginning of the 21st century, doesn't indicate anything beyond just that. Unless you see serious attention going to the reality behind the facade, you just see the identity-politics puppets, and you don't see that they are actually hardcore policymakers in their own right.
Condoleezza Rice had a really troubled time when she was provost of Stanford, didn't she? [Rice held the post from 1993 to 1999.]
She sure did. It's arguable that she was brought in to be the face on a very tough anti-affirmative action, pro-budget cutting regime that was trying to dig Stanford out of a financial hole, and did it mostly by cutting back on staff and funding for multicultural programs. It seemed to some people there at the time that she was getting away with things that a white man never could. She wasn't an expert, it seemed to them, in how federal affirmative action mandates actually worked. She would say things like, "We believe in affirmative action in hiring but not promotion" -- well, federal affirmative action mandates require both. That's the law.
