Eleanor Clift Interview

By Katharine Hikel

VTW: I'm sitting here with MS magazine ("Closing the Leadership Gap" by Marie C. Wilson, president of the White House Project), and the opening line of the story I'm looking at is: "Men and women must be in power to moderate the influence of masculinity on all of us." In that vein, after reading Susan Estrich's Sex and Power, in which she says that Gore lost the election because he disregarded the "crown jewel of the electorate," as you so happily refer to women voters: did you agree?

EC: I read Susan's book, and I didn't get that from it. Gore did go after women, and I remember that once he appeared on The David Letterman Show, and his platform was so female-centered that Letterman told him, "You go, girl!" (laughter)

Gore's problem was that the Democratic party was not united behind him, and he was still worrying about how to present himself, even in the fall; there was a lot of controversy over whether he needed to stir the base, or whether he should reach for the middle. The whole populist economic campaign in the fall -- the people versus the powerful -- was really designed to appeal to base voters, and women are part of the Democratic base. I don't think it was especially aimed at them. I don't think he ignored women; I just think he had so many problems that he didn't know which one to address first.

VTW: How do you think Kerry is doing?

EC: This period, since the end of the primaries, is really kind of a fallow period, and I think they're experimenting, trying to get things right, and trying not to create controversy. They'll really launch his candidacy when they choose a vice-president, and when he appears at the convention. I don't think he is aggressively going after the women's vote in this period, but I don't know that he's necessarily making a play for anybody in particular, and that's why the Democrats are so nervous: they aren't sure that his rather passive approach during this period is going to work. I think the Kerry campaign figures it's all about Bush at this point. Bush has been having a lot of problems, and if the country decides they don't want Bush any more and are willing to look elsewhere, Kerry just wants to be there. So I really think the real election doesn't begin until the convention.

The Democratic party has all sorts of machinery aimed at women: the Women's Leadership Project, which Ann Lewis heads up; health care costs are a top issue, and that's a female-centric issue, actually; so I think you are going to see more campaigning directed at women.

VTW: What about in Kerry's campaign? Does he have any feminist stars?

EC: His campaign manager is Mary Beth Cahill, who was Ted Kennedy's chief of staff. She was brought in last November to rescue the campaign after there had been all this friction around the original campaign manager, Jim Jordan. Mary Beth Cahill gets high marks for her operational control; I don't think anybody defies her or goes around her. The campaign has been, so far, amazingly good and congenial, even if it's forced congeniality, and I think she's strong in her own right. There are other top advisors; she's not the only one advising Kerry. I do go back to when Susan Estrich was the campaign manager for Dukakis, it was widely known that she didn't really have much power, and once the campaign lost, she didn't mind admitting that. She was installed largely because of appearances; Dukakis really relied on male advisors whom he'd known for a long time, and was more familiar with, and I think that was a very frustrating experience for Susan Estrich. I think Mary Beth Cahill has real power.

VTW: I love the part in Susan's book where she says, "I told him not to get into that tank!"

EC: ( laughter) I'll bet everybody told him not to get into that tank! Did they ever identify who thought it was a good idea?

VTW: Is there anybody at all whom Kerry might be looking at as vice-president?

EC: Of the female persuasion? I'm actually struck by the fact that it's now twenty years since Geraldine Ferraro. That year the women's groups were so organized that there was a lot of public pressure on Mondale to name a woman, to the point where it became embarrassing for Mondale; he looked like he was being browbeaten into it; yet that's really an example of the kind of power that organized women's groups had twenty years ago. Today, you don't hear any real clamor to put a woman on the ticket -- a couple of groups are sort of saying 'Wouldn't it be nice,' but I don't think Kerry feels any pressure to put a woman on the ticket.

They are nice enough to mention one or two women as possible candidates, notably Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, former attorney general of the state, a popular governor in a swing state, but I think there is a general consensus that in the post 9/11 age, somebody who is not known, and who has no real national security experience on the ticket would be much too risky. So I would not anticipate that she will be chosen. But the list of women to potentially be on a major party ticket, in both parties, is embarrassingly short.

VTW: Let's jump over to Madame President for a minute. Of the potential presidential candidates you wrote about then, are there any front-runners in your mind now, or any newcomers?

EC: My husband and I did that book together, and the difficulty we had from the beginning was identifying specific women, because the pipeline is so empty. If you look at where presidents come from, they're former governors or senators; if Kerry should win it, the last seated senator before him, of course, was Jack Kennedy. We've had mostly governors. There are eight female governors out of fifty today; and you can pretty well go down the list and eliminate each one of them as a presidential contender, at least in the near future.

At the time we wrote the book, we thought Christine Todd Whitman was the role model for the kind of woman who could go on to the presidency. She had won election in a major industrial state twice, the only woman to have done so; Ann Richards had won in Texas, but she was defeated for re-election. We thought Whitman had the perfect combination of issues. She was conservative on fiscal matters, yet she was moderate-to-liberal on social issues; and she was tough; she could stare down people in her party on the abortion issue, and showed a lot more courage on that issue than a lot of Democrats did; and she had this cool media presence. She, of course, declined to run for the U.S. Senate; then she went into the Bush Cabinet, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, where she was immediately rolled, and went on to leave rather prematurely. It's hard to see how she gets back into politics within the Republican party, and she's too loyal a Republican to run as an independent or a Democrat. She was one of our main candidates.

Then, of course, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who we thought at the time was poised to become governor of Maryland. She lost that race, so there she went.

VTW: Do you think she'll run again?

EC: It was so embarrassing that she lost that race; Maryland had been pretty steadily Democratic for a long time, and she lost to a Republican, and she ran such a poor race that I don't hear any clamor for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend to get back into politics. So the few women we identified didn't do that well.

Hillary, of course, went on to run for the U.S. Senate, and she is clearly putting the pieces together to run for president, in '08, or '12. So I guess she would be our star; and when we first started writing Madame President, there was not even a thought that she would run for the Senate; that was an extraordinary development, to have a sitting First Lady decide to run for the Senate, from a state she'd never lived in. Yesterday, at the unveiling at the White House of the presidential portrait, President Bush pointed out that Hillary Clinton was the first sitting Senator in history to have her portrait hanging in the White House.

There are bright spots, but politics is so much about serendipity, that we've got to have a bigger pool of women, so that when people drop out of the process for one reason or another, you've got others to turn to. There aren't enough women yet in public life that we have that luxury.

VTW: You've written about the problem of women in public life is that it's so hostile to women; we didn't create the environment, we didn't design it, we didn't have any input into it, so it's pretty much not ours. Is that what's holding us back?

EC: Ann Richards talks about that: that it's very difficult, because you get elected, often, if you're a woman, on the strength of the women's vote; then you get into office, and you have to adapt to an overwhelmingly male environment -- the legislature, and male lobbyists; and you have to really show your stuff on the so-called male issues, which, nationally, would mean national defense, and statewide, being really tough on crime. And suddenly, the people who took you to the dance don't think you care about them all that much. I think that's one of the reasons that Ann Richards lost re-election: women had lost their enthusiasm for her because she seemed to be governing like any other man. I think that is an issue. You have to adapt to the system, but you also have to remember what got you there, and why you're different, and capitalize on that, as opposed to smothering it.

VTW: So you have to look like Maggie Thatcher, but think like Jane Fonda?

EC: In Madame President we do quote this Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, saying the first woman president will be a 'sister mister' -- someone who'll look like a woman but pretty much govern like a man. People want change but not too much change. Finding that balance is tricky for every politician.

VTW: In Founding Sisters, it was striking then [during the 70-year struggle for the vote], as it is now, that women don't vote as a bloc; that some of us are curtailed from doing so because we have overriding allegiances to other groups like the church and other male-dominated systems. It was so striking to read the stories you wrote about women leading the anti-suffrage movement.

EC: That went on back then; in fact, you really appreciate the fortitude of the suffragists, because they were not popular for quite a long time. They were derided as 'life's losers;' they couldn't get a husband, and that sort of thing; and they stuck to it. And women who really didn't care one way or the other felt threatened: they would have too much responsibility, and could they perform in public, in the marketplace, and so women often have to be brought along. Looking at female candidates today, other women are the hardest on them, especially older women who were brought up in a different culture; to some extent, the way they live their lives is threatened by these women who take such a public posture. So they're torn between wanting them to succeed, and being afraid they are not going to succeed, and not wanting to be embarrassed if they fail. It's a complicated set of opinions that women bring to the voting booth.

The 1994 election was a big shock to moderate women. Activists sort of assumed that all women were progressive; suddenly, in 1994, we had women coming out of the pro-life movement who were activists on the other side. That created division on Capitol Hill; the Women's Caucus, which initially flourished with both Democratic and Republican women -- mostly pro-choice Republican women -- when this new breed of women came into the Congress, the Women's Caucus basically shriveled up and died. I don't know if it still even meets.

VTW: Do you think it will swing back? Is this an issue that's coming back to consciousness -- that we are not well-represented; that we are not voting as a bloc yet, but perhaps there is a women's politic, a women's agenda?

EC: I think after 9/11, Bush did even better among women than he did among men. Women were even more scared, and looked to him to be the protector. I think the prison-abuse scandal has affected women's attitudes toward the Bush administration more than it has affected men -- not necessarily that women are more offended by torture, but that they've been jostled into an awareness that this administration may not really have a plan, may not be competent in the way it's been prosecuting the war in Iraq and the larger war on terrorism. The Democrats are certainly thinking that they've got an opportunity to pull women away by asking, "Are you safer today than you were four years ago?"

VTW: Back to the voting-as-a-bloc idea: in Founding Sisters, you open Chapter Five with these words: "Movements ebb and flow, and contours change, and people are at odds over strategy and tactics, but never the goal, so they move in the same direction, however slowly or fitfully." Are we defining, or have we defined a goal, such as equal representation, yet?

EC: I don't think that if you went out and talked to average people on the street that they would cite having half the Congress or half the governors be women. Maybe if you said to them, if we had more women in Congress, we might have health care, or we might pay teachers more, or nurses more; then they would see the connection between gender and their lives. Maybe you could sell that as a goal. But nobody is really aggressively selling that as a goal right now.

VTW: Along that line, how do you feel about France and the parity amendment [all publicly-funded elections must stand 50 percent women as candidates]?

EC: I applaud it, but I also see that they have a lot of trouble getting women to step up and to run. I think you could never pull that off in this country. There's a lot of things I like about France that you could never pull off in this country. (laughter)

VTW: In Founding Sisters, it was such a great thing that you did to describe the actual ways that the women, in that age, turned themselves into media stars. They manipulated the media well: they demonstrated, they picketed, they kept an 'eternal flame' burning in a huge silver urn; they burned the President in effigy, they got arrested, then they took the ones who'd been arrested around the country on a "Prison Train" tour, and were wildly popular; they turned their abuses around to generate great sympathy and appeal. Do you think we should be acting up more these days? Does marching on Washington do any good?

EC: I credit Alice Paul with a lot of that. She had a real sense for marketing, and from the very beginning, when the initial parade at Wilson's inauguration turned violent, and horrified all the doyennes of the suffrage movement, she saw it as a positive thing because they'd gotten the attention of the country.

The women's march that was here in April felt like 'back to the future.' Women hadn't taken to the streets since 1992. The march got attention, though it did not get as much attention as I thought it would. There are still arguments over whether they achieved their goal of a million people. I attended, and there were many young people there; and that, I think, was a welcome surprise to older women, who were beginning to think that activism on so-called women's issues only belonged to an earlier generation; that young women today couldn't get interested. I think the potential is there to get women more active, but they have to have a reason. The Democrats have an opportunity to engage a younger generation in this coming election. We'll see if they can pull it off.

VTW: I was struck by reading in your and Estrich's books that men don't give women a hand -- even the story in Madame President about Bob Dole's negative influence on his wife Elizabeth Dole's campaign for President. You wrote, "Bob Dole didn't mean to sabotage his life partner's political dream, but that was the practical effect of his remarks." Of all the times to tell the truth in Washington! (laughter)

EC: Exactly; and, if vice versa -- if she had blown the whistle on his campaign -- they would have put her in a box somewhere.

VTW: There was a study at MIT, in the 1990's, designed by three women professors, which showed discrimination against women at all levels: salaries and benefits, facilities and resources, and opportunities for policy-making and influence. The guys in charge were shocked to see these facts documented; they had been living in a state of denial that any of this was going on; they believed all the equal-opportunity language they had in place, despite only eight percent of tenured faculty positions going to women. They had justified this figure by saying that it was in line with all the other faculties around. It took action by women to point out the inequities. Then the guys said, Oh, we'll fix it over the next ten years. Can a small women's monthly paper make a dent in the resistance?

EC: Today's young women don't really see inequities until they go out into the real world. Often, the disparities in the ways men and women are treated are subtle; there are not these clear barriers that you have to break down. So I think that there is room for an educating role, as to what battles are still left to fight for, and that we shouldn't take things for granted.