John Kerry: Ladies' Man?

John Kerry will not become president without women. He is now even with President Bush among female voters, but to win the White House, he needs to be a better ladies' man than Mr. Bush.

However, in the first presidential election since the Sept. 11 attacks, when security moms have replaced soccer moms, the political landscape looks less favorable for Democrats with women voters.

"The security mom includes the soccer moms, but also the waitress moms, the blue-collar women," said Kellyanne Conway, president and CEO of The Polling Company.

"Although they have no demographics in common ... what these women have in common is two things: they look at the world through the prism of their children, and security and safety is the most important thing to them."

Soccer moms were white-collar suburban women. Conway said what happened is that about two years ago, "she" issues were replaced by "we" issues.

The so-called "she" issues like Social Security, healthcare and education – which traditionally favor Democrats – are less important to women this year, according to Conway’s polling, than the "we" issues like war and the economy.

In the 2000 presidential race, Democratic candidate Al Gore had an 11-point edge over Mr. Bush among women; Mr. Bush was favored among men by the same 11-point margin.

Kerry has just a one-point edge over Mr. Bush among female voters, 46 to 45 percent, according to the latest CBS News poll, released Thursday. He needs at least a double-digit advantage with women to win in November.

To do this, Kerry attempted to soften his image with an appearance this week on "Live With Regis and Kelly." Then, in a speech in Florida, he said that President Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security would particularly hurt women because they live longer.

Though the CBS poll shows Kerry gaining some ground with women (last week Mr. Bush led him by 7 points), he’ll need to focus even more on female voters in the campaign's final five weeks.

While about 60 percent of female voters typically lean Democratic, Kerry's deficit among women is more than issue-based. To Conway, a Republican, what’s occurring is that "women don’t like erratic men."

President Bush’s portrayal of Kerry as a "flip-flopper" has marred the Democratic nominee with women. While 50 percent of women believe Mr. Bush says what he believes, only 33 percent say the same about Kerry, according to the CBS poll (which interviewed 428 men and 645 women.)

"The one thing that all women lost on Sept. 11 was a sense of control," Conway said. "They feel like it doesn’t matter what neighborhood they live in, what plane they take, what school they send their kids to or how much disposable income they have. None of it matters if your entire sense of control, order and tidiness can be upset by circumstances beyond your control."

The poll showed that more women are confident in Mr. Bush's ability to make the right decision in protecting the country against terrorism. Forty-five percent of women said they had a lot of confidence in Mr. Bush, while only 27 percent said the same about Kerry.

The president of the Feminist Majority, Eleanor Smeal, argues that in key swing states the political gender gap remains.

A Zogby poll, conducted Sept. 13-17, showed Kerry has a 10-20-point lead among women in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Minnesota. But the same poll in other key battleground states – New Hampshire, West Virginia, Arkansas, Wisconsin and Florida – found Kerry’s advantage was a mere 2 to 8.5 points.

Smeal said the election will turn on the female vote, but she questions how much the "decisive leadership" mantra of the Bush campaign has gotten through to women.

"Yes, we are at war, but some people think that the war is going in the wrong direction," Smeal said. "But to be resolute, a lot is dependent on if people think it is going in the wrong direction or right direction."

In 2000, President Bush targeted his "compassionate conservative" slogan to white-collar women, the so-called soccer moms. This year, Mr. Bush has barely mentioned that theme, instead portraying himself as a strong leader making tough decisions in hard times.

"Women care about the war on terrorism," Conway said, because it deeply affects their children’s future. "Women don’t like the past. They like to think tomorrow is a better day."

That's especially true of married women, 62 percent of whom went to the polls in 2000, compared to only 43 percent of single women.

"It’s not because they are angry or apathetic but because they don’t own homes, they don’t have kids in the public schools," Conway said. "They aren’t in the tax bracket where they have to worry so much about fiscal policy, and now everybody feels there is a vested interest in who runs the country."

She added that "when Kerry speaks about Iraq and Vietnam and George W. Bush speaks of the war on terror and homeland security," it's the president's message that resonates with women.

"The need to regain a sense of control, security and safety among women," Conway added, "has trumped every other major issue."

French Town Quietly Cheers On a Son: Kerry

Kerry's big sister lending a hand in her own way*** Peggy moved to the Village in late 1967 and has been here ever since. She has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union, has lobbied for the Community Service Society and served as consultant for Planned Parenthood. She is now nongovernmental organization (N.G.O.) liaison at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. - and she makes clear that prevents her from doing any political fundraising.***

The Silent Partner - So who exactly is Cam Kerry, anyway?

Diana Kerry, John Kerry's younger sister, delivers her speech to U.S. students of the John Cabot University, in Rome, Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2004. Diana Kerry is on a 100-city world tour to register U.S. citizens abroad to vote for the upcoming Presidential elections. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

***Diana Kerry, chairs American Overseas, an organization affiliated with her brother's Democratic party. Over 10,000 people have registered for voting on the organization's website in the last six weeks, she said. Diana Kerry is the third of four siblings. Their father was a foreign service officer, and she spent much of her life overseas, teaching English and drama in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Fluent in both German and French, she also served as a translator and interpreter at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, where 11 Israeli athletes, five Palestinians and one police officer were killed after a dramatic and violent hostage-taking. Source

John Forbes Kerry Timeline

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(CBS run article March 2004) Kerry's World: Father Knows Best

[Excerpts]

Father [Richard Kerry]***….. "Americans," he writes, "are inclined to see the world and foreign affairs in black and white." They celebrate their own form of government and denigrate all others, making them guilty of what he calls "ethnocentric accommodation -- everyone ought to be like us." As a result, America has committed the "fatal error" of "propagating democracy" and fallen prey to "the siren's song of promoting human rights," falsely assuming that our values and institutions are a good fit in the Third World. And, just as Americans exaggerate their own goodness, they exaggerate their enemies' badness. The Soviet Union wasn't nearly as imperialistic as American politicians warned, Kerry argues. "Seeing the Soviet Union as the aggressor in every instance, and the U.S. as only reacting defensively, relieves an American observer from the need to see any parallel between our use of military power in distant parts of the world, and the Soviet use of military power outside the Soviet Union," he writes. He further claims that "Third world Marxist movements were autonomous national movements" -- outside Moscow's orbit. The book culminates in a plea for a hardheaded, realist foreign policy that removes any pretense of U.S. moral superiority……***

Son [John Kerry] ***…..From the start, Richard Kerry turned his oldest son into his foreign policy protégé. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas has written, "The Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While other boys were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, [John] Kerry was discussing George Kennan's doctrine of containment." His father introduced the adolescent boy to such luminaries as Monnet and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, John Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill, Winston's wife.

As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."

….. When John Kerry came back from Vietnam, his father pushed him to be more outspoken in his opposition to the war. "When Kerry refused to speak out against the government [while in uniform], suddenly his father felt like he was being a wimp," says Brinkley. "[So he] encouraged his son to take off the uniform and to become a critic."

John Kerry, of course, did exactly this, first in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and eventually in the U.S. Senate. From the moment he arrived in Washington, Kerry promised that "issues of war and peace" would remain his passion. And, from the start, this meant that he would criticize Ronald Reagan's war against communism, especially when it was fought through proxies in the jungles of Central America. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandanista government, telling The Washington Post, "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell [the Sandinistas] what to do." Soon after his return, he pressured Congress into investigating the administration's illegal funding of the Contra rebels, opening a trail that culminated in the exposure of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And, a few years later, in the late '80s, he repeated this success, launching an investigation that revealed that another of the administration's favorite anti-communists, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, had been deeply enmeshed in drug-trafficking. Kerry was also skeptical enough of U.S. power that he voted against authorizing a popular intervention -- the Gulf war -- and opposed a 1995 resolution that would have allowed the arming of Bosnians…..***

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