The Republican Party And Women

Latinos are not the only segment of voters that the GOP seems bound and determined to alienate as it panders to the nastiest elements of the Christianist and Kool-Aid drinker GOP base. One of the other targets of GOP venom has been women. Gays, of course, are always enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the GOP/Christofacsists. NPR has a piece that looks at the impact of the GOP's war on women and contraception. Yes, some in the GOP claim that women are not being driven away from the GOP, but one has to wonder if these folks have ventured outside of the Christianist/Tea Party bubble. Here are some highlights:

It's not that the rhetoric coming out of the Republican presidential campaign is suddenly going to make women around the country start voting Democratic. Women, for the most part, do prefer Democratic candidates, and have in presidential races at least since 1992. Four years ago, women preferred Barack Obama over John McCain by some 13 percentage points (the gap was 41 points among single women). But as the conversation has gone from abortion to contraception — which is, um, virgin territory in presidential campaigns — anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that it is pushing female voters even further away from the GOP.

And in the process it may have damaged the national ticket aspirations of Bob McDonnell, the governor of Virginia thought to be a rising star in the GOP. Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly were pushing legislation that would have required a woman to have an ultrasound probe inserted into her vagina prior to undergoing an abortion, a procedure pushed by anti-abortion legislators in an effort to make a woman think twice before terminating her pregnancy.

As for Limbaugh, many Republicans insist that he is an entertainer, not a party spokesman, and thus they should not be tarred when he goes off on someone in his broadcasts. But that's a cop-out, writes Steve Kornacki in Salon:

Limbaugh's show is almost entirely about politics, and the themes he stresses invariably echo and influence the themes that Republican politicians across the country emphasize. And Republicans themselves have spent the past two decades promoting the image of Limbaugh as their leader.

Liz Halloran, my NPR colleague, wrote that the irony in all this is that Republicans were making genuine inroads with women, . . . now the GOP, "who so recently saw an opportunity to close the gender gap, may now be watching it widen."

Personally, I have zero sympathy for Republicans who looked at what they thought was short term advantage and ended up instead selling the party's soul and creating a largely lobotomized party base. Rick Santorum's popularity is a testament to the debasing of the Republican party.