Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign was a disaster with one undisputed strength: his wife, Elizabeth. Her vitality and intelligence underscored his languor and half sentences, leading some to suggest she’d be a dandy Republican candidate in 2000.
The idea is nuts, declares the summer issue of the conservative Women’s Quarterly, with right-leaning critic Kate O’Beirne deriding Elizabeth Dole’s alleged potential appeal in a piece titled, “The GOP’s Answer to Hillary.”
The quarterly is proudly, even defiantly, anti-feminist. And O’Beirne, herself the engaging Washington editor of the National Review (you’d much rather go out drinking with her than Dole, one suspects), finds fault with the premise of a prospective Dole candidacy, namely that it would narrow the so-called “gender gap” between women voters and the GOP.
“It is not courage but fear and confusion that are causing Republicans to talk about putting a woman on their ticket,” O’Beirne writes. “They hope to appeal to women voters by engaging in bean-counting identity politics that is now outdated but perfectly suits Elizabeth Dole.”
That’s because, writes O’Beirne, Dole is “the figurehead for a generation of Republican women who dominate the party structure” and whose feminist inclinations are viewed by O’Beirne as conflicting with both the party’s conservative base and a younger generation of Republican females.
Women like Dole are often white, well-educated, well-off and without children and, for sure, may not look like “their more radical sisters in the Democratic Party,” writes O’Beirne. But O’Beirne argues that similarities remain, including their believing “as fervently as Hillary Clinton or (National Organization for Women President) Patricia Ireland that women still get a raw deal in society” and that a “glass ceiling” precludes their true advancement.
To that extent, O’Beirne finds Dole to have practiced the sort of “identity politics . . . that would impress Donna Shalala.” She cites various initiatives during Dole’s government tenure, including creating a commission on the glass ceiling while labor secretary under President George Bush.
Ultimately, her argument is a political one. It concludes that the feminist belief that women vote for other women because of gender is boneheaded, noting fairly persuasive examples of their spurning high-profile female candidates.
“Yet the GOP remains convinced that showcasing women will attract female voters to the party like a Nordstrom going-out-of-business sale,” writes O’Beirne, who finds that simply mistaken.
In fact, she believes that activist GOP females are increasingly anti-feminist and, for example, blast as folly the military’s same-sex training and co-ed barracks.
Is Elizabeth Dole, who now heads the American Red Cross, a dandy candidate for the “modern” woman? Nope, according to O’Beirne. The notion that she might be is merely “yesterday’s vision of the future.”
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