Politics As Boys' Club

CongressDaily's Erin McPike writes in this week's National Journal:

This election year isn't looking too promising for female candidates.

Early on, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley rocked the political world by losing the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Edward Kennedy. Until shortly before Election Day, the seat was widely assumed to be safely Democratic, even though the commonwealth has never elected a woman to the Senate. Among the earliest signs of serious trouble for Coakley were the sexist remarks popping up. Teamsters were vowing, "I'm not voting for that broad," according to a labor leader. At a GOP rally, one man reportedly shouted, "Shove a curling iron up her butt!"

Fast-forward to April, when a local chapter of the Ohio Republican Party sent out a mailer urging, "Let's take Betty Sutton out of the House and put her back in the kitchen." The two-term House Democrat is being challenged by auto dealer Tom Ganley.

To Mary Anne Marsh, a Massachusetts-based Democratic strategist for the Dewey Square Group, the Coakley and Sutton slams are part of a disturbing pattern. "When you go back and look at the 2008 presidential election and look at how [disrespectfully] Hillary [Rodham] Clinton and Sarah Palin were treated -- if it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone," Marsh said. Clinton and Palin "have precious little in common, but [the abuse heaped on them] gives permission for everyone else to be treated like that as a woman in politics," she said. "People don't want to realize it, but it's just more acceptable to be critical of women."

...

The freshman class of the 112th Congress is likely to be bigger than usual and, especially if Republicans pick up a lot of House seats, conspicuously male. Both parties have struggled to recruit viable female candidates this cycle.

Although Republicans boast that they have more women running for House seats than ever before -- 97, according to a Republican National Committee count -- few have become prominent contenders. Of the 115 candidates identified by the National Republican Congressional Committee as its "Young Guns," just nine are women. Only two women are in the top tier of that program.

Already, one highly touted GOP recruit has faltered: Former U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan was crushed in the primary in Pennsylvania's 4th Congressional District, losing to Keith Rothfus 67 percent to 33 percent. One NRCC official remarked, "She certainly underperformed our expectations."

Still, NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions of Texas insisted recently, "We've really got good women candidates, and strong ones, who I not only talk with but encourage." He added, "I'm real proud of them."

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In Senate races, Republicans could wind up with five competitive female nominees. The party now has four women in the Senate. The National Republican Senatorial Committee recruited three top female candidates for the Senate this year: former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina of California, former New Hampshire state Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, and former Colorado Lt. Gov. Jane Norton. All three face very competitive primaries, however.

The party did not recruit the top two candidates in the 12-way Nevada Republican primary, the winner of which will face Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid: former state GOP Chairwoman Sue Lowden and former state Assembly member Sharron Angle. Nor did GOP leaders handpick former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon in Connecticut. Women could well clinch both of those Senate nominations.

Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski, who is the only woman in her party's Senate leadership team, has taken on a role similar to that of McMorris Rodgers in the House. She wants to increase the number of GOP women in the Senate. Murkowski has focused her leadership role as vice chair of the Senate GOP conference on reaching out to women and Hispanic candidates and on making diversity a higher priority for her party.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats count 13 female senators. Strategists acknowledge that they have fewer women candidates in open-seat races or as challengers this year than the Republicans do. They contend, however, that Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, who is running against former House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, is more likely than any nonincumbent Republican woman to win a Senate seat this year. In Iowa, Democratic lawyer Roxanne Conlin is unlikely to prevent Republican Sen. Charles Grassley from winning re-election, but top Democrats count the well-qualified Conlin as a recruiting coup.

Party leaders also ruefully point out that they might have had a stronger crop of female Senate candidates if Florida state CFO Alex Sink had not chosen to run for governor; if former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius had not become secretary of Health and Human Services; if former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano had not become Homeland Security secretary; and if Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan had not opted to run for a third term.

But for three Republican-held Senate seats that Democrats are targeting, the party has favored male contenders. North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall is headed for a June 22 runoff against former state Sen. Cal Cunningham; the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee quietly prefers Cunningham in the race to take on GOP Sen. Richard Burr, insiders say. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, D-N.H., expressed interest in running for the seat that Republican Sen. Judd Gregg is vacating, but party leaders apparently wanted Rep. Paul Hodes, and she stayed out. And in Ohio, although party leaders allowed the Senate primary to take shape between the eventual winner, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the DSCC reportedly made it clear in several ways that Fisher was its choice.

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Men still head the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee, and all of the party committees that recruit candidates for top-tier offices -- House, Senate, and governorships. Men chair all six recruiting panels and all have white male executive directors. Add in the DNC and the RNC, and all eight chairs are men, as are seven of the eight executive directors.

At a political event at the Newseum in Washington last fall, six of the eight executive directors (with a male stand-in for DNC Executive Director Jennifer O'Malley Dillon) sat on a panel. A woman in the audience asked why the group was so homogenous, rendering the panelists nearly speechless.

Delaware Gov. Jack Markell chairs the Democratic Governors Association, aided by Executive Director Nathan Daschle. Their counterparts at the Republican Governors Association are Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and staff chief Nick Ayers. Menendez, who is Hispanic, leads the DSCC, with J.B. Poersch, who is male, in the top staff spot. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee; Rob Jesmer is in charge of operations. In the House, Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee; he put Guy Harrison in charge of day-to-day operations. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is led by Chris Van Hollen, whose top staffer is Jon Vogel.

The RNC's chief of staff is Mike Leavitt. Chairman Michael Steele is African-American. At the DNC, Chairman Tim Kaine partners with top staffer Jennifer O'Malley Dillon.

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The few women in top leadership roles at the party campaign committees tend to say that women are advancing but that they wish the trend were accelerating. At the DCCC and the DSCC, the vast majority of directors -- the middle managers -- are women. DCCC Communications Director Jennifer Crider and DSCC Political Director Martha McKenna are known to be extremely influential within their committees. Geri Prado, the woman who managed Fisher's campaign in Ohio throughout 2009, said of McKenna, "She owns that shop. And she's who, as a campaign manager, you interface with the most."

McKenna pointed out that women are managing half of the DSCC's top races this cycle, including the contests in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Missouri, and New York. Prado was surprised to hear the number of women who are managing Senate campaigns and said that when she interviewed for such positions, her competitors were always male.

As Crider put it, "Across the board, no one will be satisfied until it's no longer remarkable that you're a woman in the job."

Read the whole article here.