Republican Tactics for Targeting Women

Intensely interesting account by blogger Matt Stoller, who infiltrated a training session on how the Bush/Cheney campaign intends to target women, in whose hands all agree the outcome of this election lies. A few high-lights:

"The target for the Bush campaign this year is married women with high religiosity, women who voted for Bush in 2000 and value their family's safety."

"Women like teamwork, not bickering, and feel like the heavy partisanship is a lot like their kids fighting -- the point-counterpoint angle doesn't work, and while the Swift Boat ads worked really well with white men, it failed to work with women. In fact, it turned them off."

"The bottom line here is that women want change, and 'the Bush campaign is not anywhere in the hemisphere of where these women are,' [according to Bush/Cheney campaign consultant Leslie Sanchez]."

"On socially conservative issues, women aren't buying. They are tolerant with regards to gay marriage, they like to solve problems and deemphasize politics, and ardent pro-life or religious intolerance doesn't appeal to them."

Stoller's conclusion, after sitting through three-and-a-half hours of "tactics": "This is a women's Convention. The Bush team needs the moderate center represented by married women -- without them he is toast, and they are leaning away from him right now. They are full of angst about where the country is going, they do NOT like the hard-right elements in the Republican Party, but they do not trust Kerry at this point. The strategy is a scare strategy -- make them fear Kerry's indecisiveness on national security, malpractice awards, and government waste .... The bottom line here is that the President's messaging strategy so far has been a failure with women, and women will decide this election. This Convention is an attempt to fix this political problem, but the only real solution is to scare women into voting for him, because Bush has no real successes that he can credibly point to (and that women believe) .... the strategy is remarkably cynical and completely framed in marketing terms. A lot of it sounded like we were learning to speak in the language of women's magazines. There was no discussion of whether any Republican policies are actually good for women -- it was entirely tactical."

The Party of We're So Holy That Everything's a Tactic.