This bit from Garance Franke-Ruta is so good I'm going to excerpt it at length:
I've been exceptionally impressed with the quality of the comments on this blog over the past week, which have been wonderfully intelligent, thoughtful, and polite. One question that's come up over and over, however, is why this topic mattered, or should matter, to those outside of elite media circles.
...
Take what is, I believe, the single most important issue facing middle-class families: the rise of the 50-80 hour work week and the disappearance of the weekend. Anne Applebaum wrote about this recently. I bring the issue up in story meetings at the Prospect at every available opportunity. And I’m regularly surprised by the number of young, progressive women I know who tell me that the thing they dislike most about the Democratic Party is its obsessive focus on abortion instead of the question of how to combine work and family and not go crazy. They want to be approached as mothers and potential mothers, as well as people with jobs and aspirations, not as atomized rights-bearing individuals given to crisis pregnancies. But those who raise such issues often cannot get any traction because there are simply not enough voices in high enough positions in the press or the party to create buzz. And so the topic remains a cultural issue on the left, rather than a matter for political consideration and action. Result: middle-class mothers vote Republican, and the Democratic Party has won a smaller fraction of the female electorate each presidential-election year since 1996. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party carries on loudly about the outsourcing of manufacturing sector jobs, which are mainly held by men, and judicial appointments, which are crucial to preserving reproductive rights but, once again, turn the focus back to abortion.
Read the whole thing.
