New York Times Pushing Inane "Dems Are The Mommy Party" Narrative
May 15, 2007 -- 12:36 PM EST // // Post a Comment
Check out the headline on Patrick Healy's latest Web-only column on Hillary in The New York Times:
The piece says: "Mrs. Clinton is, in essence, a mom running to lead the Mommy Party for all the other mommies (and daddies, too, to be fair), proposing policies that flow from her own insights on how the government does and does not help families."
Wow, that's quite a concession -- "daddies" support Dems, too!
I know this is supposed to be "freewheeling," given that this is the Web and all, and yeah, I get the Hillary-mom-mommy-party gag. But really: Have we now been reduced to describing Dems as the Mommy Party in our headlines with no quotes or visible irony?
Actually, let's use this occasion to ask a larger question: Does the assertion that Dems are seen as the Mommy Party have any basis whatsoever in any kind of empirical reality? Or is it time to retire this formulation?
I just checked in with Karl Agne, a veteran Dem strategist and pollster for Gerstein Agne Strategic Communications, and asked him what various ways one could gauge whether Dems are really viewed as the Mommy Party in any meaningful sense. He suggested a bunch of metrics: Percentage of males voting Dem. Numbers on "hard" strength indicators such as which party can be trusted on the generic issues of national security and terrorism. And numbers on whether Dems are viewed as "strong" leaders or not (not that moms can't make strong leaders, of course).
Okay, then. Over to the numbers.
(1) While more males voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 election, the 2006 midterms showed a shift in this trend. Exit polls found that in all the House races, 50% of men voted for Dem candidates, while only 47% of men voted for Republicans. Though more women also voted for Dems, the numbers on males are pretty striking.
(2) "Stronger" leaders? The most recent number I can find is from this Pew poll from March 29:
Which party has "stronger" leaders?Democratic Party 41%
Republican Party 36%
That's a dramatic swing from last September, when the GOP won that question hands down, 43%-30%.
(3) "Hard" national security and terrorism numbers? Poll after poll has shown that Dems have erased the GOP's advantage on the issue.
Look, I don't mean to oversimplify matters. Could someone cherry pick from polls to create the impression that the "Mommy Party" perception is real? Probably. Do Dems need to worry about lingering perceptions of them as somehow "softer" on international affairs? Sure. And the piece does concede that Hillary has good "commander in chief" numbers -- in virtually the last paragraph, of course.
But come on, let's face it: The Mommy Party generalization has become inane and simplistic, and frolicking around with it is just unbecoming for the "paper of record." At bottom it's cause for embarrassment, really. As Agne aptly put it to me:
"This whole silly idea of a Mommy Party and a Daddy Party is of course based in the notion that voters trust Republicans more when it comes to 'hard' issues like war, terrorism, and security and Democrats more when it comes to 'soft' issues such as health care, education, environment, etc...The absolute crash of public confidence in the Republican Party over the last year has rendered this idea completely irrelevant."
Yet there it is, right in a Times headline.
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