Ten
IN EARLY 1991, I got a lunch invitation from Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). At the time, California was in the unusual position of potentially having both senate seats up for grabs. Because Pete Wilson had become governor, a special election was scheduled for his seat, for which former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein was a very strong candidate. In addition, campaign issues and health problems plagued Democratic senator Alan Cranston—and Barbara had her eye on his seat.
Over sandwiches in Barbara’s congressional office, we talked about her senatorial prospects. I advised her that her highest priority was to travel the state and put together a solid fund-raising base.
After that, Barbara called me periodically, full of enthusiasm. “I spoke to the League of Women Voters in Orange County, and they were all excited,” she told me. “I think they really liked me.”
“Yeah,” I quickly replied. “But did you ask them for any money?” We often laughed about my insistent emphasis on money—but I knew it was absolutely essential to finance the huge TV campaign that was necessary to win in California.
Meanwhile, the women EMILY’s List had already elected were flexing their muscles in Congress, and we began to see the fruits of their labors. Women legislators were the driving force behind the Family and Medical Leave Act and health-related bills before Congress such as Patsy Mink’s Ovarian Cancer Research Act. Pat Schroeder, as chairwoman of a subcommittee on the Armed Services Committee, had been given credit for single-handedly making family issues—child care, education, equal pay—mainstream political issues.
Thanks to Barbara Mikulski’s work in the Senate, the National Institutes of Health launched a major new women’s health initiative. It was hard to believe, but until the mid-eighties, clinical studies for many critical diseases, such as heart disease and stroke, included only male subjects. Even though laws had been changed in the mid-eighties, no one paid attention until 1990, when Barbara, using her clout overseeing NIH appropriations, led an effort to create the NIH’s Women’s Health Research Initiative, which launched long-term studies on a variety of women’s health issues, the largest effort of its kind ever conducted in the United States.
In addition, in the House, a formidable triumvirate sometimes known as DeLowsi—a reference to Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Nita Lowey (D-NY), and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)—had begun putting forth legislation to provide a safety net for women, families, and kids. Most notably, in 1991, they succeeded in getting funding for breast cancer research put into defense appropriations.
THEN, COMPLETELY OUT of the blue, something happened that had an enormous impact on EMILY’s List. It reminded me of a term I learned during my summers on Nantucket referring to whalers who harpooned their gargantuan prey, which then took off at breakneck speed. When that happened, the sailors had no choice but to hold on for dear life on a “Nantucket sleigh ride” that was full of excitement and had the promise of a great reward. My sleigh ride was about to start.
On June 27, 1991, Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, the first and only African American on the nation’s highest court, announced his retirement. The strongest liberal voice on the bench, Marshall was not happy that it fell to President George H. W. Bush, a Republican, to name his replacement. But Marshall was eighty-two years old and in poor health. “The strenuous demands of Court work,” he said, were “incompatible with my advancing age and medical condition.”
The question of who would replace Marshall instantly became a heated Washington parlor game. Needless to say, there was enormous pressure on President Bush to appoint another black justice to the court. But Bush also now had an opportunity to put a conservative stamp on the court that could last for ages. Roe v. Wade was just one law of the land that could be threatened. All this was of great interest to me, but, initially at least, it wasn’t clear that it would have much impact on EMILY’s List.
Then, just four days after Marshall’s announcement, on July 1, 1991, Bush named Clarence Thomas as his nominee. A graduate of Yale Law School, Thomas had been appointed in 1974 as assistant attorney general of Missouri under Missouri attorney general John Danforth. When Danforth became a United States senator, Thomas moved to Washington and became his legislative assistant. Then, Thomas served as assistant secretary of civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education and, in 1982, was appointed by Ronald Reagan to be chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Over the next eight years, Thomas became a favorite of conservatives thanks to his vocal opposition to affirmative action. Instead of filing class-action suits against discrimination, the usual EEOC approach, Thomas aggressively promoted a doctrine of self-reliance, accompanied by heated rhetoric he used to eviscerate a number of black civil rights leaders.
Now, after announcing Thomas’s nomination to the nation’s highest court, President Bush said that “the fact that he is black and a minority had nothing to do with this.” Of course, that was ludicrous. Even Republicans bemoaned Thomas’s lack of qualifications. According to the book Strange Justice, by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, the most authoritative examination of Thomas’s nomination, officials in Ed Meese’s Justice Department during the Reagan administration had been highly critical of Thomas’s legal scholarship. When Bush became president, White House counsel Boyden Gray drew up a list of potential Supreme Court nominees, and Thomas’s name was not on it.
And with good reason. His experience as a jurist was minimal. In 1990, Bush had appointed Thomas to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but he had been on the bench for less than two years. He had never written a single constitutional opinion. He had never tried a single case before a jury. And just a year earlier, when Justice William Brennan resigned, President Bush’s advisers warned him that the American Bar Association would almost certainly find Thomas unqualified for the Supreme Court.
But, thanks to the racial politics surrounding the nomination, all of that was of no consequence. As the descendant of American slaves, Thomas had ascended from rural poverty in a fabulous narrative that gave cover to Bush and the Republicans against charges that they were insensitive to minorities and the poor. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) confirmed as much when he warned Democrats, “Anyone who takes him on on the subject of civil rights is taking on the grandson of a sharecropper.”
None of that meant Thomas was immune from criticism, however. Knowing that the pastor of Thomas’s church had compared abortion to the Holocaust, feminists protested that Thomas might vote against Roe v. Wade. But the Bush White House diffused such attacks by making certain that Thomas took no position whatsoever on abortion during the confirmation process. To do otherwise might jeopardize support from moderate Republican senators such as Arlen Specter (R-PA).
At the same time, the White House quietly began lobbying Democratic senators who might be swing votes for Thomas. Vice President Dan Quayle put in a call to his golfing buddy Sen. Alan Dixon (D-IL), who, it turned out, was up for reelection and likely to face a successful Republican businessman named Gary MacDougal. According to Strange Justice, Quayle told Dixon that a vote for Thomas would be valued highly by the White House. Later, when Dixon made his support for Thomas known, MacDougal found that much of the support he had from wealthy Republicans mysteriously began to vanish.
Meanwhile, Kenneth Duberstein, the former White House chief of staff under Reagan, was brought in to shepherd Thomas through the hearings before the Senate. Under Duberstein’s aegis, Thomas underwent rigorous coaching sessions in the Old Executive Office Building, mock trials of a sort, to prepare him to be grilled by the Judiciary Committee. In addition, Thomas visited privately with more than sixty senators before the hearings got under way. Conventional wisdom had it that his confirmation would be a breeze.
What few people knew, however, was that in late July, a lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission in Washington named Gary Phillips got a call from an old friend of his from Yale Law School, Anita Hill, who had become a law professor in Oklahoma. When Phillips asked her what she thought about Clarence Thomas’s nomination, he was stunned by what he heard. Hill had worked under Thomas at the EEOC and quit, she said, because he had sexually harassed her. According to Strange Justice, the last thing she wanted was “to get involved in a political three-ring circus,” but Phillips thought she was struggling with whether or not to come forward. At this point, of course, almost no one was aware of her charges.
Instead, when Thomas’s Senate hearings began, on September 10, the nation heard the moving story of his journey, which began in Pin Point, Georgia, where his mother made twenty dollars a week as a maid. It was, as Thomas put it, “a life far removed in space and time from this room, this day, this moment.” Some of his testimony was the stuff of inspirational dreams, but for the most part Thomas came across as somewhat wooden and unresponsive.
MEANWHILE, AT EMILY’S LIST, Wendy Sherman had decided to join a media-consulting firm. Rather than replace her as executive director, I brought on Karin Johanson as political director, with an eye toward focusing on all the new open seats created by redistricting.
BOTH MEN AND WOMEN often ask me why it’s important to have women in Congress. Why shouldn’t they just vote for the best candidate? Ann Richards, with her record-setting appointment of women and minorities and her clear ability to lead Texas, provided one very clear reason. But an even more powerful and dramatic answer was about to materialize in the form of a fascinating national psychodrama played out on TV before tens of millions of mesmerized viewers.
It started drearily enough. For a full week, Clarence Thomas’s testimony was a study in evasion and nonresponsiveness. The New York Times characterized it as “a blend of childhood reminiscences, quips, regurgitations of elementary constitutional theory, platitudes, and, in one instance, what Senator Biden called ‘the most unartful dodge I ever heard.’” A federal appeals-court judge, John Minor Wisdom of New Orleans, called the hearings “the most unilluminating I’ve ever heard.” In his late-night monologue, Tonight Show host Johnny Carson declared, “Last night’s audience was influenced by Clarence Thomas. It’s not that they didn’t like the material. They just felt it was wrong to give an opinion on it.”
Such criticism aside, Thomas’s testimony was highly successful in one regard: it seemed likely he would be confirmed. THOMAS WINNING THROUGH EVASION; ELUSIVE NOMINEE SKIRTS OPPOSITION headlined the Boston Globe.
But then, on October 6, two days before the Senate was scheduled to vote on Thomas’s confirmation, the floodgates burst open. National Public Radio’s legal affairs correspondent, Nina Totenberg, reported that Anita Hill said Thomas had sexually harassed her when she was his special assistant at the EEOC. Hill, who had since become a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, said that Thomas often talked to her about his sexual interests and sexual acts he had seen in pornographic films, that he asked her out socially many times, and that he graphically discussed his own sexual prowess and anatomy.
The full Senate was eager to proceed with the vote on Thomas’s confirmation, on Tuesday, October 8. Barbara Mikulski urged a delay in the vote, but she was the only Democratic woman in the Senate.
So, on the House side, on the very day the vote for confirmation was scheduled to take place, seven Democratic women—Reps. Barbara Boxer, Pat Schroeder, Louise Slaughter, Patsy Mink, Nita Lowey, and Jolene Unsoeld, and delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton—marched over to the Senate side of the Capitol to tell the senators that they needed to take Hill’s allegations seriously and reopen the hearings. Because Senate rules forbade outsiders from attending party caucuses, they were barred from meeting with the senators. Senate majority leader George Mitchell met separately with the women and told them to call Democratic senators who were supporting the Thomas nomination.
The Judiciary Committee, under the chairmanship of Democratic senator Joe Biden, was doing everything it could to minimize the issue. But, thanks to Totenberg’s story, it was impossible to put the toothpaste back in the tube. The entire nation—or at least the female half—was up in arms. So, on that day, the Senate Judiciary Committee bowed to the political pressure and reopened Thomas’s confirmation hearings.
Prior to this moment, the phrase “sexual harassment” had been an obscure term that was rarely uttered in public. As such, it served as the ultimate gender-biased Rorschach test. Sexual harassment? The vast majority of men didn’t have a clue. Remember, to a large extent we were still living in a Mad Men world in which men were the bosses and women were valiantly struggling to build their careers. Men thought nothing of patting a woman on her backside, commenting in great detail about her appearance, or making an off-color joke at her expense. So, as Anita Hill’s story unfolded, millions of men wore puzzled looks or dismissed the charges as frat-boy high jinks. Most men had little or no understanding of the sexual politics behind male–female employer–employee relationships. They didn’t want to. It wasn’t in their interest.
But to tens of millions of American working women, this was an earth-shattering moment. At one time or another, they had witnessed or experienced sexual harassment and had suffered in silence to protect their jobs and reputations. Women who had never told anyone they were victims of sexual harassment suddenly came out of the proverbial closet. In elevators, at watercoolers, in carpools, and over the phone they tiptoed into the great unknown, speaking the truth about inappropriate behavior foisted upon them in their workplace.
Working women discussed the many tactics they would use to avoid further harassment and/or retaliation by their bosses. They spoke of trying to diffuse the situation with humor. They told of attempts to keep from being alone with the harasser. They talked about trying to get transferred within their company or looking for a new job. They talked about losing promotions or being fired because they wouldn’t “put out.”
Anita Hill’s courage in publicly making her charges unleashed years of pent-up rage in many working women. They believed Clarence Thomas’s behavior was horrible and that he should not be on the United States Supreme Court. Quite simply, they believed Anita Hill, and they wanted to know where the women senators were who could defend her. “People kept asking me, where were all the women in the Senate?” Mikulski said. “Why aren’t there women on the Judiciary Committee? And when I explained, there are only two of us in the entire Senate, they said, ‘Wow!’”
The next day, October 9, the EMILY’s List phone started ringing off the hook with queries, mostly from Los Angeles, asking for membership information. Soon enough, Judy Krantz called from L.A. and explained precisely why. When she got the Los Angeles Times that morning, the first thing she saw was the front page of the style section, featuring a big picture of Gov. Ann Richards smiling and saying, “I would not be the governor of Texas today if it were not for Ellen Malcolm and EMILY’s List.”
The timing couldn’t possibly have been better. Just when women all over the country were rising up in anger, Ann Richards’s ringing endorsement boosted our national credibility. If there were more women in office, perpetrators of sexual harassment would be punished, not elevated to the United States Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, the hearings reconvened. On Thursday, October 11, Anita Hill herself finally testified, stating under oath that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, first while he employed her at the Department of Education, and later at the EEOC. She said that Thomas asked her out on dates many times while he employed her, and when she demurred he began introducing graphic sexual subjects at work, such as women having sex with animals, and discussed films depicting rape or group sex. Hill testified that Thomas repeatedly discussed his sexual expertise and his own anatomy. In what would become perhaps the most famous detail of her testimony, according to Hill, Thomas once pointed to a can of Coca-Cola on his desk and asked, “Who put a pubic hair on my Coke?” A narrative about racial politics had been transformed into one about sexual politics. The entire country was riveted.
Hour after hour, senators grilled Hill, questioned her veracity, and made her out to be a spurned woman seeking revenge. Here you had a woman who was a graduate of Yale Law School and had gone on to become a soft-spoken, understated law professor, and the Republicans were characterizing her as promiscuous and delusional. “A little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” became the Republican mantra.*
This was not exactly the kind of colloquy one expected from what was supposedly the nation’s most dignified deliberative body. But it was precisely the sort of discourse that kept tens of millions of Americans glued to their TV sets hour after hour, day after day, watching a national spectacle unfold the likes of which had not been played out since Watergate, seventeen years earlier.
Yet, as time went on, one thing became increasingly clear: explosive as Anita Hill’s charges against Clarence Thomas were, the way her allegations were handled—or, rather, mishandled—was equally astonishing. Her Republican critics asserted that Hill had come forth at the eleventh hour to smear Clarence Thomas. But that wasn’t true. In fact, a report of Hill’s allegations had been made known to the Senate Judiciary staff three months earlier, in July.
Hill was not asked to come forward to the Senate Judiciary Committee until September 12. She gave the FBI sworn affidavits and cooperated with its investigation, which ended on September 25. Yet, somehow or other, even then the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Biden, did not see fit to question Thomas about the allegations. It was not Biden’s finest hour.
In other words, here, in the midst of an intensely bitter, partisan political battle, were serious allegations that would provide the Democrats with powerful ammunition against Thomas’s confirmation, yet the Democratic Party had been giving Anita Hill the runaround for weeks.
And why was that?
The first answer was quite simple: they were men. Out of the fourteen members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, there was not one single woman. And the men in the United States Senate, Democrats as well Republicans, were as clueless about sexual harassment as other men throughout the United States. Gender trumped partisanship.
As reported in Strange Justice, by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, when first apprised of the allegations, unwittingly explained the situation. “If that’s sexual harassment,” he said, “half the senators on Capitol Hill could be accused.” In other words, many of them had harassed women, and, to the extent that they had, this was the last subject they wanted to discuss.
There were other factors as well that kept the Democrats from acting. Four years earlier, they had waged a bloody, unprecedented battle that had killed President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and many simply didn’t have the stomach to go through that again.
But the paralysis in the Senate was a pathetic response to the tens of millions of women who were in an uproar, made worse by the fact that the victim of the harassment was being publicly vilified for coming forward. The gender divide had never been more explicit. It was there for all to see. On October 15, 1991, Thomas was confirmed in the Senate, 52–48, the narrowest margin of approval in more than one hundred years. When the roll was called in the Senate, you heard the word Mister fifty-two times before the first woman was called. One can only imagine the result if women had made up more than 2 percent of the United States Senate. As if to make the point abundantly clear, the National Women’s Political Caucus took out an ad in the New York Times featuring a drawing of fourteen women senators facing one lone man: Clarence Thomas. The tagline was “What if . . .”
EVEN THOUGH THE NOMINATION was over and Clarence Thomas was headed for the high court, the fallout from the hearings had just begun. “The Anita Hill experience was such a defining, historic moment,” said Hillary Clinton, whose husband was just starting his 1992 presidential campaign at the time. “I had gone to law school with Clarence Thomas, and, though I didn’t know him well, he seemed surly to me even then. And here was this incredibly put-together woman, and at great cost to herself she comes forward and ends up being treated like some kind of heretic. ‘Burn her at the stake!’ I was appalled. I was so proud when Barbara Boxer and the whole crew marched over.”
Suddenly, women all over the country saw the need to elect women. EMILY’s List’s phones rang off the hook. A woman from Chicago called to tell me I absolutely had to come there to tell her and friends—women professionals at large Chicago businesses—how to help elect women senators. I was on the phone so much that I lost my voice. We quickly ran out of EMILY’s List brochures. One reporter after another called me, too. Among them was a woman journalist who, by the end of the conversation, had dropped all pretense of being a disinterested, neutral observer. “Oh, my God! I was so furious!” she shouted. “I couldn’t believe how they treated Anita. Where were the women?”
Clearly, something extraordinary was happening. Judi Kanter, Betsy Crone, and I agreed we needed to regroup to maximize our marketing efforts—immediately. Betsy moved our direct-mail recruitment schedule into high gear. She and our writer, Paul Bennett, met with me at the office to discuss a new solicitation package keyed to the Thomas-Hill hearings. The whirlwind continued. On my way to the West Coast, I had a brunch in Chicago with about twenty women professionals who held significant positions in accounting, law, and other businesses. “I was a child of the sixties,” one of them said. “I protested the war in Vietnam and went to all the marches. But when I got married and my career took off, I put aside politics. Now, I have to get back involved.”
This was our market—women who had marched against the war in Vietnam, who had lived through and appreciated the political passions of the tumultuous sixties. These women, now in their forties and fifties, had significant financial wherewithal and untapped political power. They had careers and appreciated how difficult it was to balance work and family. Now, the disgraceful way Anita Hill was treated and the disregard for women in the workplace had reignited their political passions. EMILY’s List was exactly what they had been looking for: a way to elect women like themselves to office. EMILY’s List was a way for them to make their own decisions and to know they were really making a difference.
Judi Kanter was organizing events fast and furiously. I flew to Houston for an event with Sherry Merfish, who had hosted our party three years earlier with Ann Richards and Mary Landrieu. This time, things were different. When Sherry picked me up at the airport, she was agog at what had been going on. There was so much demand for the event that she had run out of invitations. More were being printed. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
Sherry feared the hosts would be upset. “We’re going to have about three times as many people as I told them,” she told me. Fortunately, the weather was good, so we used the hosts’ backyard.
Later that afternoon, when I arrived at the event, I was flabbergasted to see the registration line all the way down the sidewalk. Even more astonishing, when Sherry escorted me into the backyard, I was met by three TV camera crews. On occasion, print reporters had shown up at our events in the past. But TV? Never.
When Sherry had hosted the same event three years earlier, about 40 people attended, roughly 25 of whom actually wrote checks. We had considered that a real success. But this time, 450 people paid $100 at the door to join EMILY’s List and left eager to tell their friends all about us. Moreover, TV news crews spread the word far and wide.
The reverberations from Hill’s testimony were still being felt all over the country. In November, just after the Thomas hearings, I joined nine hundred women—four hundred of them state legislators from all over the country—at a dinner at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, at which Anita Hill was the guest of honor. When she arrived, she was greeted like a rock star, with one woman after another, Republican and Democrat alike, climbing atop her chair, waving a pink napkin and chanting, “An-i-i-i-ta, An-i-i-i-ta.”
By now we knew that a seismic change was under way that would be felt for years to come. We quickly moved to harness the energy from all over the country and transform it into political power. It was clear we would raise record amounts of money. Sexual harassment wasn’t the only issue. Polling data showed that women were angry that Congress didn’t have a clue about what was going on in the lives of working women and their families. The women polled thought elected women would understand the economic pressures of daily life and would be tough fighters on those issues. EMILY’s List was flooded with phone calls from celebrities and working women alike, all wanting to elect more women.
Women candidates became the symbol of the change voters were yearning for, the end of “politics as usual.” In Washington State, Patty Murray, a citizen lobbyist for environmental and educational issues with little political experience, ran for the United States Senate. In California, Dianne Feinstein declared, “Two percent is fine for low-fat milk, but not for women in the United States Senate.” Barbara Boxer ran for the second Senate seat in California. In Pennsylvania, Lynn Yeakel took on Republican senator Arlen Specter, who, having accused Anita Hill of “flat-out perjury,” had emerged as one of the archvillains of the Thomas-Hill hearings. In the House of Representatives, a banking scandal had created a “throw the bums out” ethos. And, of course, virtually all the “bums” were men.
Some of the women candidates didn’t appear to stand a chance. While I was traveling that fall, back in Washington, EMILY’s List political director Karin Johanson had a visit at the office from an impressive forty-four-year-old African American woman who had been a federal prosecutor and state representative in Illinois. As the Cook County recorder of deeds in Chicago, she had been enraged by Sen. Alan Dixon’s vote for Clarence Thomas and had decided to challenge the incumbent Democrat. She was completely focused on how badly the process had failed. “She was unbelievably charming,” said Karin. “She was really smart. Terrifically impressive. She had a great smile. She had gone to Yale Law School. She was having a fine career there in Cook County. All I could think was, ‘My God, I really want to support her.’”
There was just one problem. When it came to the question of viability, this impressive newcomer, named Carol Moseley Braun, by every measurement we knew, wasn’t even in the ballpark. Challenging an incumbent in one’s own party was problematic enough, but Sen. Alan Dixon had won twenty-nine consecutive elections. And even if you argued that Dixon’s vote for Clarence Thomas made him vulnerable to the rising anti-incumbent tide, he already had a strong challenger for the upcoming Democratic primary: a wealthy liberal Chicago lawyer named Al Hofeld, who boasted a hotshot campaign adviser in David Axelrod and was starting off with $5 million in his war chest.
By contrast, Moseley Braun had no money to speak of—just commitments of roughly $80,000, and those were commitments, not real money. The primary was scheduled for March 17, 1992, just four months away, and Moseley Braun had started her campaign, if you could call it that, way, way too late. Even if, by some miracle, she got traction, she and Hofeld would split the anti-incumbent vote, thereby ensuring Dixon’s reelection. This one was too much of a long shot for us. Karin gave Moseley Braun what encouragement she could, but we couldn’t put our resources behind her.
MEANWHILE, I WAS OFF to New York for another fund-raising trip, and on November 19, I got a message from a producer at CBS’s 60 Minutes named Patti Hassler. 60 Minutes, of course, was and remains the most successful newsmagazine in television history. I called back immediately.
At the time, one of the stars of the program was Mike Wallace, the hard-boiled investigative reporter known for his devastatingly tough interviews of the famous and infamous. Was that what I was in for? At first, I was somewhat guarded. But soon enough, I figured out that Patti was sincerely interested in how the Thomas-Hill hearings would impact women in politics. Fascinated by every detail, she had an especially curious mind. She probed me about EMILY’s List until she knew as much about it as I did. Soon, I decided the more the 60 Minutes folks knew about us, the better the piece would be. When I told her how excited women were at our events in Chicago, Houston, and elsewhere, Patti insisted on seeing the phenomenon firsthand. We had four big events coming up in February in Florida: in Miami, West Palm Beach, Tampa, and Tallahassee. CBS would be with us at all of them. I quickly called Judi Kanter to get her to orchestrate things, to make sure everything ran smoothly.
EXHILARATING AS THESE DAYS were, we had a few rough moments as well. One of our most difficult decisions had to do with the upcoming Senate battle in New York, where two strong pro-choice women, Geraldine Ferraro and Elizabeth Holtzman, were vying for the Democratic nomination to run against the Republican incumbent, Al D’Amato.
We had known something like this would happen sooner or later. Earlier that year, in fact, I raised precisely this issue before the EMILY’s List steering committee, saying that I expected we would soon have races with more than one pro-choice woman candidate. But now it was not a mere hypothetical. “Here we had two well-respected, iconic feminist figures,” said Karin Johanson. “How were we going to figure this out?”
Ferraro, of course, had been the first woman vice presidential nominee in either party, and had a sterling record in Congress. Holtzman had been elected to Congress when she was just thirty-one, and had served as district attorney in Brooklyn. In 1980, she had lost the New York senatorial race to D’Amato by just 1 percent, and, with the Clarence Thomas backlash, this time she might well be propelled over the top.
To make things more complicated, a number of people on the steering committee were close to Gerry Ferraro. My Common Cause “good government” training taught me to make sure all decisions we made—especially ones that might be controversial—were done in a fair and proper way. So, I quickly put together a small group of independent advisers who had no relationship whatsoever with either Ferraro or Holtzman. Their mission was to find out who would be the strongest candidate to win the Senate race. That meant deciding who would be the strongest candidate to win the general election, not just the primary. During their evaluation process, they would help us define the decision-making process for future candidates. To that end, they met with the two candidates and with their campaign managers. They examined the campaign strategies and funding. And they commissioned a statewide poll.
AS 1992 CONTINUED, I realized that had the Clarence Thomas hearings happened five years earlier, there was no way we would have been prepared as an organization to take advantage of the fallout. But we had by now resolved critical questions about how EMILY’s List would operate and had built an infrastructure to help us recruit members and raise money. Even though we had a staff of only seven, we were positioned to take advantage of the unusual political opportunities the 1992 election offered because of redistricting. For me personally, I had learned a great deal about how to lead a small but significant political organization. I was no longer as terrified of public speaking and had acquired some skills in fund-raising and media interviews. Best of all, I was as excited as any member to turn the disaster of the Thomas-Hill hearings into a political victory for women. I was fired up, and there would be no stopping me. By January, our membership was skyrocketing, and the primary season was just getting under way.
So, when we arrived in Florida in early February, I was optimistic about the 60 Minutes piece. We had been traveling with the show’s crew to the Tallahassee home of Florida education commissioner Betty Castor, with four women running for Congress. Scores of women were there. I had given my presentation time and time again, but on this occasion, Patti was there with the 60 Minutes camera crew and I was wearing a wireless mike.
Feeling impassioned, I went into my talk about how the Clarence Thomas hearings were fueling our movement. “I can tell you the anger and the fury and the energy that came out of those hearings is going to turn into support for women candidates,” I said, “and we’re going to have a record number of women elected in 1992 because of what happened in there. Yes!”
As I spoke, my eyes panned the room, much as the CBS camera was doing. One woman after another was cheering or giving me a thumbs-up sign. There was an incredible new kind of political energy. The women all had that look of infectious excitement in their eyes. Finally, standing in the corner, was Patti Hassler. When I saw she had the same look of exhilaration as the other women, I thought, “Whew, this story is going to be okay.”
Two days later, I was flying across the state with Patti, and I tried to get her to tell me what would happen when the 60 Minutes piece on us aired. But Patti was the consummate professional. She wouldn’t bite.
I tried another tack. “Tell me about other stories you’ve done,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “if you’re the watercooler story on a Monday morning, you will get a big response.”
How big? I asked. Ten phone calls or ten thousand?
“Very big,” she said. “The show airs Sunday night, and if everyone is talking about it Monday morning, you can have a pretty phenomenal response.”
Now, that gave me something to think about. As soon as we landed, I called the can-do Betsy Crone and told her we needed to make special arrangements for all the incoming calls we would get.
“I’ll see if I can get another phone line,” Betsy said.
“No!” I said. “You don’t understand. We may get thousands of calls. Tens of thousands.”
Betsy went off to see what we could do.
ON FEBRUARY 14, we finally decided that Gerry Ferraro was the strongest candidate in the New York senate race. In large part, that was because Ferraro had a bigger following upstate than Holtzman, whose support did not extend much beyond New York City. In addition, thanks to her big national following, Ferraro was in a much stronger position to raise funds in the rest of the country.
I believe we came to our decision in a fair and rational manner, but that didn’t make Elizabeth Holtzman happy. “What bothers me most about your rush to judgment is, it harkens back to the same machine politics all of us have fought long and hard to defeat,” she said in a letter to me.
We knew we would get grief for it—whichever way we decided—and, of course, we were right. Holtzman’s campaign manager, Ed O’Malley, compared EMILY’s List to the Soviet Politburo. According to him, I just gave marching orders and everyone did as I said. “You might as well put a cigar in Ellen Malcolm’s mouth,” he said.
Well, that’s politics. Our mission was to add as many pro-choice Democratic women to office as possible. For us not to have made a decision would have been fainthearted. And that meant that at various times, we at EMILY’s List were hard-nosed pols. You have to be to win.
So, I took it all with a grain of salt and sent O’Malley a box of White Owl cigars. I made sure that a short note accompanied the cigars. “Have one on me!” it said.
MEANWHILE, THE PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES were under way. President Bush had emerged from the Gulf War with an astoundingly high approval rating of 89 percent. But since then, the country had plunged into a recession so deep that he had been in freefall in the polls. As a result, 1992 became one of those rare election cycles in which even an incumbent president was vulnerable. A number of high-profile Democrats, including New York governor Mario Cuomo and Sen. Al Gore, had declined to seek the nomination, however, meaning that the field was dominated by former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, California governor Jerry Brown, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, and a relatively unknown governor of Arkansas named Bill Clinton.
I was particularly interested in Clinton, because I knew Hillary was a key figure in the Children’s Defense Fund, the American Bar Association, and the Children’s Health Insurance Project—in short, a woman who was a leader in her own right. If her husband won, she would likely be a very different kind of First Lady, indeed, the first woman professional to live in the White House. In fact, I’d heard so many incredibly great things about Hillary that that alone made me curious about the Clinton candidacy.
On Sunday, January 26, 1992, just before the Iowa caucuses, Bill and Hillary went on 60 Minutes to rebut allegations by a woman named Gennifer Flowers, an Arkansas state employee, TV reporter, and part-time cabaret singer, that she had had an extramarital affair with Bill. It turned out to be a memorable and highly successful damage-control operation. This was essentially the first time Hillary had been introduced to America. I think she succeeded in confronting an embarrassing and awkward situation while retaining great personal strength and dignity. “There isn’t a person watching this who would feel comfortable sitting on this couch detailing everything that went on in their life or their marriage,” she said. “And I think it’s real dangerous if we can’t have some zone of privacy.” Then came the kicker. “You know, I’m not sitting here—some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.”
Hillary ended up taking flak from fans of Tammy Wynette, the country singer. But I felt she held her ground with dignity.
That year, no fewer than thirteen women were running for the Senate in hopes of keeping Barbara Mikulski company. The reason was simple. “That all-white, male Judiciary Committee was for so many women a dramatic visual image of a reality most women have been aware of for years,” said Ruth Mandel, a professor at Rutgers University and director of the Eagleton Center for Women in Politics. “Women all over have known what it is to confront all-male boards of governors, all-male banking commissions, all-male agencies, all male boards, usually behind closed doors, but this time it was a face-to-face dramatic confrontation, and televised.”
Some of those women senatorial candidates were real long shots—none more so than Carol Moseley Braun in Illinois, whose candidacy was explicitly tied to the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill episode. “If the Senate had done its job right from the start, we all would have been spared the mess,” Carol said. “And who were these guys anyway? Where were the women, the minorities and the regular working people?”
Moseley Braun had gone ahead with her poorly financed noncampaign and had not made much headway. “Talk about your underdogs,” said Tony Podesta, a college friend of Moseley Braun’s who became her political consultant. “I couldn’t even find a professional fund-raiser who she could pay to work for her.” As a result, donors who intended to support her sometimes were not even called. Moseley Braun did not have enough money to travel throughout the state. For the most part, she was an afterthought—if that. Chicago’s Rotary Club, for example, invited both the incumbent Democratic senator, Alan Dixon, and his challenger Al Hofeld to speak before their luncheons—but not Moseley Braun.
As the campaign unfolded on the Chicago airwaves, Hofeld went after Dixon hammer and tongs, while Dixon returned the favor with TV ads lambasting Hofeld as a rich trial lawyer. The result was that Carol emerged unscathed, but still no one knew who she was. She had virtually no media campaign.
When Moseley Braun made public appearances, she was able to generate enormous enthusiasm. But she had little else going for her. And to the extent she got free media in the local papers, it wasn’t all favorable. Her staff was rife with internal conflicts. Campaign manager Kgosie Matthews had never managed a campaign before, and, according to Alton Miller, Moseley Braun’s press secretary, the effort on Moseley Braun’s behalf was “so screwed up that I couldn’t be a part of it anymore.” Miller and two other top campaign aides quit.
Initially, the polls showed Dixon with nearly a two-to-one lead over Carol. At first, Hofeld trailed badly. But then, as his media blitz unfolded, in February, he gained ground. First, he was neck and neck with Carol, and finally, in early March, he edged into second place. One poll showed Carol a full 30 points behind Dixon with just two weeks left in the campaign. It would take a miracle for her to win.
Then, on Sunday, March 8, just nine days before the election, something began to happen. For one thing, a new poll showed that Dixon had slipped to 38 points and Moseley Braun had moved to 28, just 10 points behind him. If one believed the wildly fluctuating polls, she had somehow chopped 20 points off a 30-point gap she had had just a few days earlier.
Until this point, voters knew very little about Moseley Braun except that, as the Chicago Tribune put it, “She’s not Hofeld or Dixon, and apparently that’s enough to make many of them want to vote for her.” Outspent more than twenty to one by Hofeld, even at this late date Carol had not run one single television ad—unheard of for a serious senatorial candidate.
Then, later that same Sunday, at a televised debate between the three Democratic contenders, Carol came off as the strongest, in part because Dixon and Hofeld were beating up on each other. Thousands of people disliked those nasty men who couldn’t seem to be nice, and Carol was the epitome of likability.
The next day, Monday, March 9, with just eight days left before the primary, thanks to Carol’s fine debate performance, enough last-minute funds poured into her campaign that she could finally begin running TV ads. “People do like to be with somebody who’s perceived as having a chance,” said Sue Purrington, the Chicago director of the National Organization for Women. “I think the poll and the debate have fired up her campaign. We’ve already gotten a lot more calls here about ‘How can I help? I saw her last night.’”
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, a one-time presidential candidate and a powerful voice in the black community, jumped in himself with last-minute radio ads for Moseley Braun, a move that was certain to shore up the black vote. But there were just eight days left until the election.
Then, on Wednesday the 11th, Gloria Steinem, the cofounder of Ms. magazine and, as the Chicago Sun-Times put it, “a figure of mythic proportions in the women’s movement,” put together a breakfast in Chicago that poured $25,000 into Carol’s campaign. “An investment in social justice is the best investment you can make,” she said. Then, Steinem took out her checkbook and wrote a personal check of $1,000 to Moseley Braun’s campaign.
There were now six days left to Election Day.
Then, Gloria called me. Something was happening in Chicago, she said. EMILY’s List should support Carol. You shouldn’t write her off, she told me.
Frankly, I was astonished. Gloria knew we were serious about our commitment to getting as much bang for our buck for EMILY’s List members. That meant not taking fliers on lost causes. Much as we liked Carol, she had never seemed viable. She had recently been down by as many as 30 points. She had raised only roughly $150,000 at this point, whereas Hofeld had already spent more than $3 million of his own money. And now, with just five days left, Hofeld was digging into his bankroll for at least another million.
“But Gloria, she doesn’t even have a campaign,” I said. “She’s not even on television, so I doubt anyone knows she’s running.”
But Gloria pushed back. “I’m telling you something is really happening,” she said. “There is an incredible amount of energy out there. Women are still furious about the Thomas-Hill hearings, and they want Carol to win.”
Normally, EMILY’s List either recommended a candidate or didn’t; it was all or nothing. The only possible case we could make for Carol’s success was that, with Hofeld and her in a seesaw battle for the anti-incumbent vote, all that anger and energy might tip in her favor. Hofeld’s massive ad campaign had inflicted enormous damage on Dixon, but it didn’t make voters like Hofeld. What if Carol was the real beneficiary? Jesse Jackson was now a vocal supporter of Carol, so the black vote might turn out in force for her. And, of course, as I had been telling everyone, this was the year of the woman. With Gloria Steinem, the National Organization for Women, and, of course, us on the case, perhaps we could work a miracle.
And so, at the last minute, with no time left for a fund-raising mailing, we endorsed Carol and gave her the maximum $5,000 direct contribution.
ON THE EVENING OF MARCH 17, as the returns rolled in, it became clear that the quid pro quo that Senator Dixon had made with Dan Quayle had exploded in his face. Assuming that his vote for Clarence Thomas would ensure smooth sailing in November, Dixon hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the political power of women. Now he was paying for it. At 11:30 p.m., Bob Schieffer of CBS News reported, “Senator Alan Dixon is in the fight of his political life with a Cook County courthouse official named Carol Braun who did not even run a television ad until last week.”
In the end, primary night in Illinois hit the political world like an earthquake. The impossible had happened. Carol Moseley Braun, a black woman with little statewide name recognition, a minuscule ad budget, and next to no television advertising, had somehow conquered a previously undefeated longtime incumbent senator in the Democratic primary.
Dixon’s vote for Clarence Thomas had inadvertently lit the fuse to forge a powerful new coalition between urban black voters and suburban white women angered by Dixon’s betrayal. According to the exit polls, Moseley Braun got 82 percent of the black vote, and, among suburban white women who opposed Thomas’s confirmation, she outpolled Dixon by a factor of more than 6 to 1.
Moreover, this phenomenon was not limited to Carol. Rather, she had become, as the Chicago Tribune put it, “head of a de facto feminine slate” that swept into office in the state. Something dramatic had happened. “The whole day was a women’s day,” said Chicago alderman Richard Mell. “It was something that just started growing, was sort of a word-of-mouth thing. It wasn’t anything formal.”
Many people simply voted for every woman they could find on the ticket: women local officials, women legislative candidates, even women judges. According to Judy Erwin, who won the Democratic nomination for Illinois state senator from Lincoln Park, “When there was an opening and not an established, well-liked incumbent, the advantage seemed to go to women.”
Three Democratic women sought nominations to the Metropolitan Sanitary District Board. All of them won. In the races for Cook County judgeships, forty women sought nominations, and three-quarters of them won.
It was only March, and Illinois was just the first state to hold federal primaries. But if Carol Moseley Braun could defeat an incumbent senator in the primary, the sky was the limit. The Year of the Woman had officially begun.