Policy Focus: Women's Issues

As I have tried to show in previous messages, there is simply no comparision on women's issues between Barack Obama - who has fought his entire life to protect the reproductive, employment and civil rights of women - and John McCain who has been actively hostile to our rights.

But women do not really need to be told this. Women are smarter than that. Women are the heroines of our democracy. In every election they vote in larger numbers than men, and in every election they are more likely to vote Democratic. That's not because politics has been especially welcoming to women - it hasn't. And it's not because the Democratic party has always lived up to its own ideals on women's issues - it hasn't.

Women vote, and vote Democrat because they care. They care about a whole range of issues from the quality of education to services for the poor. They care about ending this war and they care about preventing future wars. They care about keeping this nation safe - and they care about the safety of our troops who are doing this work for us.

On these issues and on so many more, there is simply no comparison. John McCain has literally NO PLAN on education. He believes in endless war followed by endless occupation. He proposes a tax plan that would provide huge benefits to the most wealthy and leave the poorest out in the cold.

These are all women's issues. So unquestionably, Barack Obama is the women's candidate even though he is not a woman candidate.

This Frank Rich article is well worth a read in full.

You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a fierce foe of abortion rights or that he voted to terminate the federal family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings. You’d never know that his new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.

But while the McCain campaign apparently believes that women are easy marks for its latent feminist cross-dressing, a reality check suggests that most women can instantly identify any man who’s hitting on them for selfish ends. New polls show Mr. Obama opening up a huge lead among female voters — beating Mr. McCain by 13 percentage points in the Gallup and Rasmussen polls and by 19 points in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey.

How huge is a 13- to 19-percentage-point lead? John Kerry won women by only
3 points, Al Gore by 11.