the bushwomen--they're back
The Bushwomen. They're Back.
Laura Flanders on August 30, 2012 - 7:13 PM ET
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Former New Jersey governor, Christine Todd Whitman is usually described in the money media with the words “moderate” and “pro-choice” glued firmly to her name. The Republican governor of a pro-choice state, she’s on the record saying that abortion is “a personal decision between a woman and her doctor,” and the government has no business telling a woman what to do. (That used to be the conservative position.) She’s held up as a tragic-comic pro-choice hero, abandoned by her party, but the fact is, Whitman’s done more to help the vicious wing of the GOP than she ever did to stop the backlash.
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She agreed to do it again, when the party invited her to co-chair the RNC. The Republican Party would be “more inviting to all voters without an abortion plank” Whitman told the New York Times shortly before the event kicked off in San Diego. She promised pro-choice Republicans, in effect, that they’d be welcomed, even if they were concerned about the social service attacks in the Contract and the party’s 1992 manifesto. In 1992, the party platform stated that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed” and called for a “human life amendment to the US constitution.” (The party’s pledged to pass a Human Life Amendment since 1980 – that’s 32 years and nine presidential elections. They dropped their commitment to the Equal Rights Amendment in 1980. The Democrats dropped their pledge to the ERA in 2004.)
When she could have gone to the mat to support her pro-choice colleagues, Whitman stuck with Gingrich. When pro-choice Republicans sought to remove the party’s anti-abortion plank in a platform fight, Whitman, to whom many looked for solidarity, did not even show up at a pro-choice demonstration. Inside the convention hall, she sold out two pro-choice governors who tried to make a stand. When Massachussetts Governor William Weld and California Governor Pete Wilson refused to address the convention rather than bow to party officials' orders that they not talk about their support for abortion rights, Whitman said not a word from her coveted role as RNC co-chair. She even insisted on CNN that Weld and Wilson’s absence had nothing to do with their pro-choice stance. Her co-chair at the RNC that year was a fellow up and coming young governor, George W. Bush. Except he was up-and-coming; she was on her way out.
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As for “mushroom cloud” Condi. Don’t get me going. Anyone who wants to read more about the cynical way the GOP deploys its women can, in my 2004 book: BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species. It’s due for an update. Every year.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169664/bushwomen-theyre-back