Slate's Bizbox
chatterbox: Gossip, speculation, and scuttlebutt about politics.

Did Parris Blow It for Kathleen?Revenge of the soccer moms.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2002, at 4:47 PM ET

Chatterbox doesn't know why Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, widely recognized as one of the most promising Democratic politicians of her generation, failed to win the Maryland governorship. (Full disclosure: She's a friend and former employer; Chatterbox worked on her unsuccessful 1986 bid for Congress.) At the moment, though, Chatterbox is inclined to blame the incumbent governor, Democrat Parris Glendening.

Before proceeding, let's dismiss two hackneyed interest-group arguments floated in today's newspapers:

  1. Townsend lost because she failed to name a black running mate. The Washington Post writes that Townsend's choice of former Republican Charles Larson "backfired when black leaders in Prince George's County complained that Townsend had passed over qualified black candidates and was taking the African American vote for granted." This has been a favorite Post theme for several months. But the Post's own exit poll shows that Townsend won 87 percent of the black vote, about the proportion her Democratic predecessor, Gov. Parris Glendening, won in 1994 and 1998. Turnout in Baltimore and Prince George's County, the two major concentrations of black voters, was comparable to what it was in 1994 and 1998. Townsend's Republican opponent, Bob Ehrlich, did choose a black running mate and took out a two-page ad in the Post trumpeting that fact. But he still got only 11 percent of the black vote.

  2. Townsend lost because Maryland is sexist. The Baltimore Sun quotes Thomas F. Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, arguing that Townsend's fitness to govern was questioned because she was a woman. "There's some serious gender bias," he said. Then how to explain the durability of Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski? If anyone were being sexist, it would have to be women: The Post poll shows that 61 percent of white women voted for Ehrlich while only 38 percent voted for Townsend. Ehrlich's support among white women was only seven percentage points lower than his support among white men.

Now let's turn to Glendening. The Maryland governor blamed Townsend's defeat on her campaign, which, he told the Post, was "one of the worst-run campaigns in this country." He elaborated: "She had a very small group of advisers, and they put on the oddest campaign for governor anybody has ever seen. You have to remember your base, and they did not." Now, whenever a candidate loses a bid for office, it's safe to say that candidate's campaign fell short. Townsend's personal style was nowhere near as slick as Ehrlich's, and that likely played a role. Nonetheless, as noted above, Townsend did well with the Democratic urban base, so you can hardly blame Townsend for not tending to it. It was white suburbanites who gave her problems.

Even if it were true that Townsend ran a bad campaign, why would Glendening want to put out that message? It was Glendening, after all, who chose Townsend to be his lieutenant governor and then handed her an unusual amount of responsibility, which he seems to believe she handled well. "She was a great lieutenant governor," Glendening told the Post, "and she would have been a great governor." So why dump on her candidacy? Because an alternative explanation for Townsend's defeat would be that Townsend was hobbled by Glendening's legacy, in particular his failure to close a state budget gap, which Ehrlich made a huge deal about throughout the campaign. Forty-seven percent of those polled by the Post said, "Democrats have controlled state government for too long and it's time for a change." That does not reflect well on Glendening.

Even more than Glendening's policies, the voters may have been rejecting Glendening himself. Consider: The group that failed to come through for Townsend was white women. During the previous two governor's races, white women split their vote between Glendening and his Republican opponent. This time around, though, they shifted their vote decisively toward the Republican. Are white women especially exercised about balancing the budget? Of course not. Based on casual observation, though, Chatterbox knows that your typical soccer mom, on hearing that a 59-year-old man divorced his wife to marry his 35-year-old deputy chief of staff, as Glendening did earlier this year, would incline toward rage. Chatterbox does not condone this rage—women, too, have been known to leave their husbands, and logically the depth of the betrayal shouldn't be inversely proportional to the age of the new lover. Nonetheless, the phenomenon exists, and it would be foolish to discount its intensity. The odd thing to ponder is why these soccer moms would take out their anger on a female candidate. But that's no odder than what happened in 2000, when voters vented their anger against Bill Clinton's White House dalliances by withholding their votes from Al Gore, a Boy Scout candidate who adores his wife. Or rather, by withholding just enough votes to deny Gore a clear victory in the Electoral College.

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
E-mail Timothy Noah at .
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Remarks From The Fray:

timothy noah makes a rather unconvincing case that kathleen kennedy townsend (his "personal friend and former employer") didn't deserve to lose her bid for the maryland governor's office. in fact, he marshalls no facts at all; one is left wondering if he is simply assumes that:

- because she is the sitting lieutenant governor, kennedy-townsend naturally deserved to ascend to the higher office. in fact, this is her first elected office, and she was defeated previously for statewide office. i (along with many other voters, obviously) simply viewed her as "kathy come lately" without any real elective office background.

- as the only kennedy without charisma, her policy-wonk persona should count more than it did. but voters rejected wonkism with ("lieutenant president") gore also, didn't they?

- kennedy-townsend appears never to have held a position in the private sector, at any point in her life. her resume consists of several college instructor positions, and charitable positions associated with the John F. Kennedy Library and Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation. does she even understand how ordinary people earn a living? it wasn't apparent from the campaign she ran.

lt. governor townsend is a pleasant, well meaning person who has sporadically tested the willingness of maryland voters to elect her to office, and succeeded only once - as Governor Glendenning's sidekick.

noah is totally incorrect when he alleges that Glendenning is the reason Ms. Kennedy-Townsend lost . . . he's the only reason she even held the rather ceremonial and empty position of lt. governor.

and voters understood that, even if reporters overlooked it.

-- Baltimore Aureole

(To reply, click here.)


It is true that Townsend was saddled with Glendening's unpopularity, but she ran the worst campaign that I have seen since Dukakis in 1988. She lost a double-digit lead. She had no coherent message and no response to Ehrlich's depiction of himself as a can-do, up-from-the-bootstraps leader. She couldn't even capitalize on Ehrlich's anti-gun-control stands after the hysteria of the sniper shootings. And, despite the zeal of the many national politicians who have long believed that her lineage entitles her to some role in national politics, she has never won even a single election on her own in her life. (In the congressional race in which Chatterbox worked for her, Townsend lost to Republican Helen Delich Bentley, whom another Democrat managed to defeat yesterday!) Yes, I voted for Townsend, but I knew eight weeks ago that she was going to lose. My 68-year-old mother voted for her too, even though she thinks that Glendening is a schmuck for dumping his wife

-- k. arthur

(To reply, click here.)


"and logically the depth of the betrayal shouldn't be inversely proportional to the age of the new lover."

Why not? As "Hume" would say, there is a gap between "is" and "ought" in this sentence. It IS the case that certain people feel a certain way about middle-aged men who dump their same-age wives for younger women. The chatterboxer would like that NOT to be the case, simply because he wanted the election to come out differently. So he declares it "shouldn't be" so.

Methinks it is the chatterboxer who is illogical here. Any woman reacting in the way he describes is reacting in a visceral way with a (bio)logic all its own, as biologically inclined psychologists will be happy to explain to him.

-- J&C's Christopher

(To reply, click here.)

(11/7)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Imagine if...
Hiatt | What if McCain had waged his campaign based on respect?
Editorial: Meddlesome PalinKing: The Danger of Palin Power