LADIES' FIGHT. I'd...

LADIES' FIGHT. I'd like to add a couple factual points to the discussion between Linda Hirshman and Mark Schmitt. First, it is demonstrably the case that Hillary Clinton has greater support from women than from men, as I blogged on this site in December. Therefore it was not, contra Hirshman, unreasonable for Clinton's strategists to suggest she might work on beefing up that support as a way of winning election. True, the women's vote has not historically been so different from the male one that it was able to swing presidential elections on its own, though it has had major impacts on public policy positions taken by all candidates, and also more recently swung control of the Senate back into the D column. But we've also never had such a strong female candidate for the presidency before, and women might very well vote differently in such a situation. It's possible that it won't be enough for Hillary, either, but if you find yourself with a 20-point gap in your favor on the part of any politically powerful constituency, political strategy 101 says you should brag about that.

Second, the well-documented fact that women are more ignorant than men about critical foreign policy issues may have helped swing the last election to Bush, as I reported in these pages in April 2006:

Despite the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein or his fellow Baathists had anything to do with 9-11, that sounds uncannily like the message Progress for America�s ads were trying to reinforce. The new ads brought up 9-11 and defined Iraq as �the frontline in the war on terror.� �If we weren�t fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, we�d be fighting them in America,� Major Chuck Larson of the U.S. Army Reserves said in one spot, echoing the concern of Lake�s focus group participants. Women may be particularly vulnerable to this message because, as Ellen Goodman has reported inThe Boston Globe, they are much more likely than men to believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9-11. Forty percent of the population was under this misimpression in 2004, with 51 percent of women believing so, compared to 29 percent of men.

It is a real problem if women's lesser consumption of all media except television leads them to an increased susceptability to televised political propaganda. That's all for now. Back over to you two again.

--Garance Franke-Ruta