Dear Commons Community,

Frank Rich has an article in this week’s edition of New York Magazine on the Republican Party’s problem with attracting the women’s vote in the upcoming election.  Abortion, contraception, and sexual harassment are touched upon as issues which the Party has not been particularly pro-women.  To the contrary, he comments:

“It’s not news that the GOP is the anti-abortion party, that it panders to the religious right, and that it’s particularly dependent on white men with less education and less income—a displaced demographic that has been as threatened by the rise of the empowered modern woman as it has been by the cosmopolitan multiracial male elites symbolized by Barack Obama.”

He also reviews some history and points to prominent Republicans (Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush) who were fairly supportive of women issues including abortion and contraception.

His most provocative comments were reserved for Rush Limbaugh who awakened the women’s issue with his attack on Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown student to whom he referred as a “slut”:

“GOP apologists like Peggy Noonan are hoping now that Limbaugh and Limbaugh alone will remain the issue—a useful big fat idiot whom Republicans can scapegoat for all the right’s misogynistic sins and use as a club to smack down piggish liberal media stars.”

I don’t think so.  The Republican Party because of its affiliations with the religious right will have a problem with the women’s vote this November. Rich provides good insight into the issue.

Tony