History Repeats Itself
I am very sick of this election; I wish we could just fast forward to John McCain's inauguration. We all know it's going to happen.

But I've been reading Susan Faludi's Backlash, and the entire book is still horrifyingly relevant, seventeen years after its publication, and this section in particularly happened to be particularly apt, never mind what you think of Hillary Clinton or Geraldine Ferraro. You can predict the future by looking at the past.



Just Not Enough Good Women

Gary Bauer never made much headway with his legislative program to promote homemaking. The $5,000 personal tax exemption he envisioned for families with housewives would have cost the deficit-stricken government about $20 billion a year in lost tax revenues. But while New Right men like Bauer lost many of their bureaucratic battles, they would eventually win the war for the national political agenda. In that struggle, the 1984 presidential election figured as a crucial turning point - the Democratic party's last stand for women's rights.

By nominating Representative Geraldine Ferraro to the vice presidential spot on the ticket, the Democrats boldly advertised to women the clear differences between the parties. The measure did not go unappreciated; it earned the Democrats new support from millions of female voters, who contributed more money to Ferraro's campaign fund than women had ever donated to any candidate's coffers. In fact, for the first time, a Democratic vice presidential candidate received as much in political contributions as the candidate at the top of the ticket. The Democratic National Committee added 26,000 new names to its rolls, the largest campaign-year increase ever spurred by a single candidate. And Ferraro's presence encouraged other aspiring female politicians. The number of women running for Senate more than tripled and the number of female congressional candidates jumped to a record high.

Ferraro's nomination also inspired instantaneous backlash from the New Right Reaganites, who attacked her not as a politician but as a woman - and, more specifically, as a "radical left-wing feminist." Before the TV cameras, they repeatedly suggested that her gender would render her incapable of defending the nation. Behind the scenes, they launched a series of whispering campaigns, all focused on her sexuality. "There were rumors about me being involved in lesbianism," Ferraro recalls, "about me having affairs, about me having an abortion." The leaders of the antiabortion movement pursued her vindictiveness. They even followed around in a blimp.

Though many political candidates in the '80s were subjected to harsh attacks and close scrutiny, the assault on Ferraro was unprecedented: It was her behavior that was on trial, but husband John Zaccaro's; she was to be punished for his management of some muddy New York real estate deals. Ferraro herself was no promoter of that profession - in fact, the Realtors association had given her an 88 percent disapproval rating. She was excoriated for her husband's reluctance to disclose his tax returns - while Bush was unscathed after placing his own assets in a blind trust, thus avoiding having to reveal his tax returns. Rumors about Zaccaro's improprieties were floated first by the New Right magazine Human Events and the right-wing Accuracy in the Media. The Washington press corps probed the business practices of this small-time landlord as if he would soon be managing the White House budget. And reporters applied themselves with perseverance that was to be notably absent four years later in the reporting on George Bush's role in the Iran-Contra affair. The Philadelphia Inquirer assigned thirty reporters to the Zaccaro story. Even after Ferraro released her family's tax returns and reviewed them in excruciating detail at a one-and-a-half-hour nationally televised news conference, investigations of "her" finances persisted, ranging far afield of her bank account. The press even looked into long-ago business associations of Ferraro's father (dead since she was eight) and Ferraro's husband's father. As columnist Richard Reeves, one of the few journalists to step back from the fray, remarked at the time, "The stoning of Geraldine Ferraro in the public square goes on and on, and no on steps forward to help or protest - not even one of her kind."

In the end, as myriad postelection polls demonstrated, neither the scandal over Zaccaro's business affairs nor Ferraro's presence on the ticket contributed to the Democrats' defeat. A recovering economy returned the White House to Republican hands. Nearly 80 percent of voters polled by Newsweek said the flap over Ferraro's husband did not figure in their voting decision. Voters weren't rejecting the possibility of a woman in high office either. In fact, a national survey after the 1984 election found that having seen Ferraro on the campaign trail, one-quarter of the electorate was now more inclined to vote for a female candidate. Moreover, exit polls found that among voters who cast their ballot on the basis of the second person on the ticket, Ferraro had the edge over Vice President Bush.

But history has a way of rewriting itself: "Polling indicated that she detracted from, rather than added to, Mondale's electoral strength," an article in the National Review decreed a year after the campaign. It did not cite these mystery polls. Other political analysts in the media characterized Ferraro's appearance on the ticket as the Democratic "surrender" to feminists - and they blamed these feminists for making Mondale look "weak" to the electorate. Democratic party leaders charged that women were responsible for the party's poor showing and women had too much influence in the campaign and were driving away the white men. Writer Nicholas Davidson asserted that Mondale "was under the gun from feminists - far more so than from other constituencies. Such was the feminist stick." Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen complained that Mondale had been "henpecked" and had succumbed to "the hectoring and - yes - threats of the organized women's movement." He had been reduced to "a stock American wimp" and "might as well sit out the campaign in an easy chair, munching a Dagwood sandwich."

Eventually, Ferraro would internalize much of this revisionist history, too - and turn on herself. In subsequent press interviews, Ferraro said that if she had it to do over, she wouldn't have run for office. Accepting the nomination wasn't "fair" to her husband, she said. And she backed off from plans to run for the Senate in 1986.

"[T]he defeat of one woman is often read as a judgment on all women," Ferraro wrote in her memoirs. And indeed, her rough experience during the campaign and her much publicized regrets later translated similarly in the minds of many American women. In 1984, 53 percent of womoen in a national poll said they believed a woman would be president by the year 2000; in 1987, only 40 percent expected it. Women who aspired to a career in politics were even more demoralized by Ferraro's public drubbing. By 1988, recruiters from both parties suddenly encountered difficulties finding women willing to run for office. The bipartisan Women's Campaign Fund had trouble giving away its seed money. Ruth Mandel, director of the Center for American Women and Politics, kept hearing potential women candidates be off with the same reason; they feared "the Ferraro factor." The popular California secretary of state, March Fong Eu, backed away from a U.S. Senate bit that year on the Democratic ticket. Her reason: her husband didn't want to have to disclose his finances like Ferraro's husband.

On Election Day, only two women (both Republicans) were on the ballot in the 1988 U.S. Senate race, down from ten in 1984. It was the smallest number of women running for Senate in a decade. On the House side, the number of female candidates slipped, too. And in every category of statewide executive races - from governor to lieutenant governor to secretary of state to state treasurer to state auditor - women's numbers plunged. Female gubernatorial candidates, for example, dropped to two, from eight just two years earlier. Only in state legislative races did the number of women running increase slightly - and even here, the growth rate had dropped substantially from previous years.

When the election results in for 1988, both women who ran for U.S. Senate had lost, leaving the Senate with its usualy two women. (The last time women broke out of that holding pattern was in 1953 - when the Senate boasted a grand total of three women.) On the House side, only two new women were elected in 1988, down from four in 1986. Overall, the percentage of women in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures had stalled, and the proportion of women in statewide elective office had shrunk to 12 percent from 15 percent just a year earlier - the first decline in eleven yeas.