Both Instapundit and Best of the Web reference this NY Times poll showing Kerry losing ground among women. They seem to think it’s the “Security Moms” factor that is causing Kerry trouble.
I wonder though if a “Gigolo Factor” isn’t also in play.
Kerry’s life history isn’t one that a lot of women would find attractive. Kerry married his first wife, a billionaire heiress, divorced her, had their marriage annulled in the Catholic Church, ran through some girl friends and then married another billionaire heiress. Kerry is not a man who has made his own money. His 3 year sojourn as a private sector attorney and an investment in a cookie company don’t seem to have netted him much. His jet setting lifestyle depends wholly on his second wife’s inherited Republican money.
Kerry isn’t a case of a multimillionaire marrying a billionaire. This guy doesn’t have much beyond his $150,000 senator salary. If he hadn’t been a Senator he probably wouldn’t have gotten to first base. The fact that he married super-rich twice also looks a little seamy.
It’s the 21st Century and intellectually most woman wouldn’t want to judge a man’s character on the basis of the wealth of the women he loves but I can’t help but wonder if when they see Kerry with Teresa they hear ever so softly in the back of their minds:
I’m Just a gigolo
everywhere I go
people know the part
I’m playing
Paid for every dance
selling each romance
Oh what their saying
There will come a day
And youth will pass away
What will they say about me
When the end comes I know
they’ll say just a gigolo
Life goes on without me
That’s got to be good for a couple of points worth of “yech” in the polls.
(cross posted at Shannon Love’s Blog)
I vote to change the name of this site to Chicago Girlz.
One of my friends has an instinctive dislike for him because of his finger pointing – her ex-husband did that. Women don’t warm up to a finger wagger.
Or maybe it is his courtship techniques. A rumor on the web describes his first (and last) date with Dana Delaney; he wanted to conclude the evening watching movies of him in Viet Nam.
And then, of course, it could be that our sex just prefers, well, a guy as Shannon put it earlier, who is at ease in his own skin.
Anonymous: Look for our Chicago Boyz Girls Gone Wild video release in early ’05.
Ginny: Clinton was a finger pointer and it didn’t seem to hurt him.
You’ve got a point, (as usual). However, Clinton was more charming; he was conversational rather than didactic more of the time. And I think a lot of us found that “with that woman” when he couldn’t bear to say her name kind of sealed it – I could never trust or like him again. And that was a finger-wagging moment. (Needless to say, my friend hates Clinton, too.)
Actually, as I remember, the married with children group was not so solidly Democratic; it was the unmarried women with children that tended to vote Democratic–to such a degree that it skewed the results. (With some sympathy I figured that was because they wanted government to be the daddy, the husband.) Is it possible that welfare reform is one of the factors in lessening the gender gap? More women at jobs, more women seeing advantages to marriage, higher rate of home ownership? Is it just that women feel more afraid of the terrorists and so vote for Bush or they feel less afraid for themselves, more independent, and therefore are more willing to vote for Bush?
(I’m trying to keep with the optimism meme, of course.)
“Is it possible that welfare reform is one of the factors in lessening the gender gap?”
A blogger or columnist, I don’t remember who it was, recently made this argument.
If we are to believe that “women” make up their minds (do they ever??) based on non-verbal clues, then I would say that Kerry is not comfortable in his skin. President Clinton, however, was comfortable in his (and everyone elses) skin.
The finger pointing bugs me. The islamo-terrorists seem to do this in every rant without fail.
Funny how this is something where Naomi Wolf and Ann Coulter are in agreement.
I think both are right; Kerry does come across as a spoiled freeloader who is desperately out of touch. He’s been coasting pretty much his whole life; it isn’t as if he’s worked hard to get elected or if he’s taken his job as a senator seriously.
I don’t think he has any idea just how out of touch he is; be it large issues (Iraq) or trivial (sports), he seems to wing it, thinking nobody will call him on his contradictions or absurdities. Not to mention the whole lifestyle thing, thinking he is being a regular Joe flying all over the country in his private jet to go windsurfing at his mansion in Nantucket, snowboarding at his other mansion in Idaho, bicycling at his third estate in Pennsylvania, and so on.