Who Is Duncan Hunter Kidding?

Martha Burk

January 30, 2007

Among the less spectacular news stories of last week was the one about Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., announcing his bid for the presidency from Spartanburg, S.C. His picture, accompanying the article near the bottom of an inside page in the New York Times , was a side shot with his right ear toward the camera. Though partially covered with unpresidential shaggy hair in need of a trim, the ear didn’t look like it was made of tin. But of course it must be. Why else would a 14-term backbencher whose platform includes support for the war, opposition to stem-cell research and outlawing abortion, believe he could buck the mood of the electorate so loudly proclaimed by the voters in 2006?

He didn’t listen, that’s why—not even to voters in his home state. And neither, apparently, did Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who announced for the Republican nomination a few days earlier with virtually the same platform, save a modest concession that the war is going badly. I don’t think these guys have heard the news.  Women are the majority of voters and can control any election. Republican women are part of that vote and when things go too far on the candidate’s phony “cultural issues,” or threaten to sacrifice the futures of their kids and grandkids in service of a war they no longer support, they leave those suburban soccer fields and go vote their priorities. And their priorities are not sending more troops to Iraq, their daughters back to the back alleys or putting an end to life-saving stem cell research.

Punitive anti-choice measures were soundly defeated in California, South Dakota and Oregon in the 2006 election, despite the huge money advantage provided by abortion opponents. Anti-choice forces were also humiliated in Brownback’s Kansas by the ouster of Attorney General Phil Kline and the decisive victory of Governor Kathleen Sibelius. Support for embryonic stem cell research played an important role for voters as well, with passage of the Missouri ballot initiative and overwhelming success of candidates all over the country who used it as a central campaign issue.

Maybe Hunter and Brownback consider the election results a non-issue, since all those pro-choicers are Democrats anyway. Well, wait a minute. Polls just prior to the election showed Republican women to be even more anti-war than Democratic women and the war overshadowed all other voter concerns. Not good news for Arizona Senator John McCain, the R with the highest name recognition and the hardest line on sticking with Bush as he escalates the conflict. In the most recent Washington Post  poll, McCain trailed former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani by seven points overall and Guiliani (the only pro-choice candidate in the Republican field) was the runaway favorite among women, 35 to 22 percent over McCain.

If this isn’t enough female trouble for the Republicans, there’s the matter of the big H—Hillary Clinton. She leads her nearest opponent, Barack Obama, by 43 percent among unmarried women. And contrary to the unscientific meanderings of pundits like Linda Hirschman —who interviewed a handful of insular stay-at-home moms recently and declared this cohort unsure about Hillary—the pros tell us she leads Obama by almost two to one among married women, generally thought of as more conservative. Clearly, the Hillary bandwagon is going to include a huge number of Republican sisters should she get the nomination. And even if she doesn’t, Republican women will still be motivated to support candidates who want to end the war and the moderates among them will also support pro-choice candidates. The question for the Republican party is whether it will stop, look and listen and pick a standard-bearer who can garner the female vote—or just go barreling ahead onto the McCain/Brownback/Hunter railroad tracks that will cause a train wreck down the line in the general election.

While Hunter roamed the backwoods of Carolina stumping from a motor home, Brownback said he would follow the yellow brick road to the White House. He must have slept through the last scenes of "The Wizard of Oz." The  world knows where the yellow brick road took Dorothy—and it wasn’t the Emerald City. In the end, she got stuck back home in Kansas.