Planned Parenthood president blasts Buck on women’s issues

Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, on a U.S. tour backing pro-choice candidates, called out Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Ken Buck as having extreme views not consistent with Colorado values. But she said voter turnout, not a shift in those values, would determine the outcome of today’s election. Buck’s campaign today dismissed Richards’ comments and said she was just dishing dirt for the Democratic machine.

Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said the turnout of women voters could be the deciding factor in Colorado’s race for U.S. Senate, where she says women are frightened of Buck’s views on women’s health. Her organization supports incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet.

“Ken Buck is really out of touch with where I think mainstream voters are,” Richards said.
“If he is elected, and this is a very competitive race as you know, I think that voters are going to be surprised on just how extreme he is on women’s health and women’s rights.”

Pointing to Buck’s opposition to abortion in cases including rape and incest, Richards said Colorado is a moderate state. “This is a pro-choice state. It is one I don’t think is going to be very sympathetic at all to elected officials that want to overturn Roe.”

The Buck campaign, however, rejected the comments of Richards as coming straight out of the Democratic playbook.

“[Richards] and the Democrat machine have tried everything they could to tear down Ken Buck, and the latest independent polls show Ken Buck leading,” said Buck campaign spokesman Owen Loftus. “Our internal polls show Ken Buck as leading. They are trying to throw this mud and it is just not working.”

A Public Policy Polling survey conducted Sunday showed Buck up one point on Bennet 49-48.

Richards said that Planned Parenthood Action Fund is working actively to turn out the vote for Bennet in today’s race. She said they are targeting a list of 50,000 supporters, many of whom are swing voters, to get out the message about Buck’s positions on women’s health. She said they are backing Bennet because he has been a strong advocate for women’s health issues in the Senate.

“I think that he stands a very good chance of winning, and it is all down to turnout. Every poll I have looked at in this race is razor thin.”

Loftus said voter turnout was working in the GOP’s favor. “The Secretary of State just released new numbers; Republicans now have a 70,000 edge over Democrats in the early vote.”

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office reporting Monday that with just over a million ballots cast, 48 percent of active Democrats, 52 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of unaffiliated voters have already voted for their candidates.

Richards said her organization was not going to let up on getting out the vote until the last polling station is closed at 7 p.m.

“Through the Planned Parenthood Action Fund we have sent a lot of mail, a lot of phoning to our supporters. Really just to educate women on how extreme Ken Buck is. If women get out to vote, certainly the majority of them will vote for Sen. Bennet.”

Richards said that politicians and analysts had initially downplayed the role women’s health issues would play in the election, instead pointing to jobs, the economy and debt as the vote drivers. However, she said that since September, as the drive to get women’s votes began, polling has shown politicians that women’s issues matter.

“You are not seeing people who take extreme positions, such as Ken Buck, advertising proudly and loudly their positions against Roe and reproductive health care,” Richards said. “So for [Colorado Constitution Party gubernatorial candidate] Mr. [Tom] Tancredo, for Ken Buck, if they were to get elected, it would be despite their position on choice.”

Loftus said that it is no illusion that Coloradans are focused on the economy in this year’s election. He said despite opposition attacks on Buck, the Weld County D.A. would be focused on the fiscal issues if he is elected to office.

“Coloradans know Ken Buck is going into Washington to fix the economy, create jobs, and get Washington spending under control,” Loftus said.

Sexism remains a problem for women seeking office

NEW YORK — Even with many high-profile female candidates, the just-ended campaign was rife with sexism ranging from snarky fashion critiques to sexual innuendo. And when all the ballots are counted, women may hold fewer seats in the new Congress than the outgoing one.

“It looks as if we’re going backward rather than forward,” Siobhan Bennett, president of the Women’s Campaign Forum Foundation, said at a teleconference Thursday discussing the prevalence of political sexism.

Two years after Hillary Rodham Clinton nearly captured the Democratic presidential nomination and Sarah Palin was the Republican vice presidential nominee, female candidates dealt with comments about their hair and seamy, anonymous Web postings. Speaker Nancy Pelosi – second in the presidential line of succession – was widely vilified by Republican candidates in ways that often seemed gender-specific.

Bennett said the prospect of sexist attacks deterred many women from running for office and was a reason why scores of other countries have a higher proportion of women in their national legislatures than the U.S., which remains at 17 percent.

Depending on the outcome of a few undecided races, women will at best hold even in the Senate with 17 seats, and could lose one or two of their 73 seats in the House. That would be the first such decline since 1978.

“Going backward is unacceptable,” said Erin Vilardi of the White House Project, a nonpartisan group dedicated to recruiting women to run for office.

She said there was a growing pipeline of potential female candidates eager to run at the local level, and she faulted both major parties for inadequate efforts to identify and support them.

Earlier in the campaign, there was widespread buzz that this would be “The Year of the Woman” – notably on the Republican side with the Senate candidacies of Carly Fiorina in California, Linda McMahon in Connecticut, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire.

Of the four, only Ayotte won. She will become the lone woman in the Senate opposed to broad-based abortion rights.

On the House side, the GOP fared better, adding at least eight new female members. But those gains were offset by defeats of at least nine incumbent Democratic women.

The number of female governors will remain at six, including three new Republicans: Susana Martinez in New Mexico, Mary Fallin in Oklahoma and Nikki Haley in South Carolina.

The outcome spells the end of Pelosi’s four-year stint as the first female speaker of the House -the highest-ranking elected woman in U.S. history.

Women’s groups monitoring campaign sexism felt that some of the GOP attacks on Pelosi were misogynistic and were irked that conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh played “Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead” on his radio show Wednesday to celebrate Pelosi’s impending demotion.

Three groups supporting an expanded political role for women teamed up in recent months with an initiative called “Name It, Change It,” – intended to swiftly protest instances of perceived political sexism that surfaced during the campaign.

On Thursday, the New York-based Women’s Media Center and its partners announced “awards” for what they considered the most flagrant examples in the media.

Among those cited were the gossip blog Gawker, for running a tawdry anonymous posting from a man claiming a brief romantic encounter with Christine O’Donnell several years ago, and the Boston Herald, for a column in which a minor party candidate’s hair was likened to a Brillo pad.

Joining the teleconference was Krystal Ball, the losing Democratic candidate in a race for a U.S. House seat in Virginia. In mid-campaign, she had to deal with the fallout of an Internet-posted photo showing her in a suggestive outfit and pose at a costume party six years ago.

Ball sought advice from “Name It, Change It” on how to respond, and forcefully defended herself against what she said was a smear campaign. Though she lost, she said her decision to denounce the tactic as sexist helped her gain votes.

“There’s no question in my mind that calling this out was the right thing to do,” she said, expressing hope that other women wouldn’t be deterred from running for office out of fear of being embarrassed by comparable tactics.

The issue of sexism has cropped up regularly in recent elections. In 2008, for example, both Clinton and Palin were critiqued for dress and demeanor in ways that seemed belittling to women.

“When you attack one woman in this way, you attack all women in this way,” said Bennett, who depicted political sexism as a bipartisan problem.

She said seemingly mild sexism – commentary on clothes, makeup and cleavage – can be as damaging to a female candidate’s credibility as sharper attacks.

“Women can fight back,” she said. “As soon as a woman says, ‘That’s sexist, that’s off-base,’ voters go, ‘That’s right.’”

For many politically engaged women, possible bipartisan solidarity against sexism is overshadowed by the bitter divide over abortion. On both sides of that debate, prominent women have been busy since the election tallying the huge increase – several dozen seats – in the number of abortion opponents in the House.

Bennett said women should not let the abortion divide impede the broader goal of getting more women – liberal or conservative – into Congress.

“You elect any woman, of either party, and you have a harder-working woman … a leader who will be paying more attention to education, to quality of life,” she said. “Having more women in elective office is essential to the long-term health of our nation.”