It's My Party (20 page)

“Why won’t a man stop to ask for directions?” Jack asked. “Because he’s a man. He’s supposed to find his way on his own. But
women? If that’s the way a complete stranger tells them to go, they’ll drive a hundred miles in the wrong direction and then
go over a cliff.”

Just as they permit themselves to be told where to drive, YDWs permit themselves to be told what politics to adopt. No one
comes right out and tells them to vote Democratic in so many words. The message that YDWs receive is much more subtle than
that. But it amounts to the same thing. “We’re talking about women who want a little glamour in their lives,” Jack said. YDWs
thus seek to emulate the people they see on television and in magazines. They copy their hairstyles. They imitate their wardrobes.
And they conform to their politics. “Oprah doesn’t go strutting her politics around on her TV show,” Jack said. “But everybody
knows without having to be told that Oprah’s no Republican. Next time you go to the grocery store, look at the magazines for
sale at the checkout counter. The whole YDW culture is right there.”

Jack is a political professional. If he said a lot of women were YDWs, I supposed, then maybe they were. And my next trip
to the grocery store seemed to bear him out. While the cashier rang up my purchases, I picked up a copy of
People
. My eye fell on “Cause Celebs,” a story about Hollywood stars who had visited Washington to lobby Congress. Ted Danson wanted
new laws to protect beaches. Anthony Edwards was seeking more money for research on autism, David Hyde-Pierce for research
on Alzheimer’s. Andie MacDowell intended to block the construction of a pipeline in Montana. I closed my eyes, trying to see
stars lobbying for conservative causes. Andie MacDowell pushing for tax cuts? Ted Danson seeking tort reform? To state the
case is to declare its absurdity. If Jack wanted to contend that the pop culture of which
People
is a part serves as a transmission belt, conveying liberal politics from Hollywood to American women, then I couldn’t gainsay
him.

But Jack’s explanation of the gender gap still bothered me. If women were as dumb as he argued, then giving them the vote
had been a mistake. Yet back in 1920, it had been Republicans who pushed the Nineteenth Amendment through the Senate. Had
the GOP been right to free the slaves but wrong to enfranchise women?

Not long after speaking with Jack, I happened to hear a speech by Senator John McCain. In passing, McCain claimed that most
of the top positions in the government of Arizona, his home state, were held by Republican women. I looked into it. McCain
was right. Of the five offices in Arizona that are filled by statewide elections—governor, secretary of state, treasurer,
attorney general, and superintendent of schools—all five are held by women, while the senior-most position in the legislature,
president of the senate, is held by a woman, too. Of the six, only one, the attorney general, is a Democrat. The rest are
all Republicans.

I flew to Phoenix. I felt sure the women who run Arizona had the gender gap all figured out.

* * *

Betsey Bayless, the first of the four Republican women with whom I spoke, is the Arizona secretary of state. As such, she
is responsible for conducting elections, registering trade names and trademarks, and other administrative tasks. Arizona secretary
of state isn’t a position people grow up burning with ambition to hold—I myself had to check her Web site to find out what
she did—but Bayless oversees a budget of $6 million and a staff of thirty-six. And since Arizona lacks a lieutenant governor,
she is next in line to the governor. This amounts to more than a constitutional nicety. In recent years scandals have forced
two men to vacate the office of governor, which was then filled by two different secretaries of state, in both cases, as it
happened, a woman.

Bayless, in her mid-fifties, is attractive and poised. We sat at a table in her office on the seventh floor of the executive
building, immediately behind the state capitol. Her window looked north toward the glass towers of downtown Phoenix, showing
skyscrapers glinting in the sun. Bayless had her secretary bring us each a cup of coffee. Then we began talking about how
Bayless got where she was.

Bayless knew from an early age that she wanted to work for a living, she explained. When she graduated from the University
of Tucson in 1964 with a degree in international banking, she was determined to get a job with one of Arizona’s banks, which
were doing more and more business with Latin America. She pictured herself drumming up business, devising new ways of financing
international trade, doing deals. Then she interviewed at every bank of any size in the entire state. The best offer she got
was for a job overseeing file clerks. She gritted her teeth and took it. Although her duties bored her, Bayless performed
them well, deciding that sooner or later her diligence would be rewarded with a job in banking, not filing. Then one day her
supervisor took her aside. Her diligence had indeed been noticed—but it was going to be rewarded with candid advice, not a
promotion. The supervisor told Bayless that because she was a woman, she would never be able to escape the clerical department
no matter how hard she worked. “You’re too talented,” he told her. “Leave. Leave or you’ll be stuck here your entire career.”

“At that point I did a review of the working world,” Bayless said. She surveyed one industry after another—retail, insurance,
real estate. In none did women hold responsible positions. Then she looked into state government. There women had risen into
management. The explanation? “The top male graduates weren’t seeking government work,” Bayless said. “They all ran off to
real estate and banking, where the action was.”

Bayless went back to school, earned a degree in public policy, then got a job with the state and began working her way up.
Over the years she compiled a remarkable series of firsts. She became the first woman to head a state agency, the first woman
to sit in a governor’s cabinet, and the first woman to chair a governor’s cabinet. In 1987, Bayless left the state government
to become a banker, finally realizing her original ambition. Then, in 1989, when a vacancy occurred on the Maricopa County
Board of Supervisors, Bayless was appointed to fill it. The job proved a big one—Maricopa County, in which Phoenix is located,
contains almost 60 percent of the population of the state. So in 1997, when Governor Jane Dee Hull offered to appoint Bayless
to complete Hull’s own unexpired term as Arizona secretary of state—Hull was one of the secretaries of state who became governor
when her predecessor as governor resigned—Bayless felt qualified to accept. In 1998 Bayless was elected to a term as Arizona
secretary of state in her own right.

I noticed an odd aspect of Bayless’s tale. Although she had been a Republican all her life, for much of her career her fellow
Republicans hadn’t helped her. If anything they had stood in her way. A Democratic governor, Bruce Babbitt, had given Bayless
her biggest promotions, naming her to head the Department of Public Administration, then inviting her to chair his cabinet.
Then a Republican governor, Evan Mecham, who would become famous for rescinding Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a state holiday,
refused to appoint Bayless to a senior position in his administration. “He also made it pretty clear he didn’t think much
of women in responsible positions in the first place,” Bayless said. It was after Mecham became governor that Bayless left
state government.

After treatment like that, why had Bayless even remained a Republican? Bayless smiled knowingly. It was clearly a question
to which she had given some thought. “Believe me,” she said, “my political life would have been a lot easier if I had been
a Democrat, and I was given lots of chances to change parties and become one. But I just couldn’t leave the Republican Party.
I believe in people taking responsibility for their own lives.”

Now that Bayless had told me her story, it was time to raise the subject of gender politics. I tossed her a softball of a
question, inquiring about the 1998 election in which Bay-less and the other women now running Arizona had been elected. How
had this triumph for women come about? Instead of taking a swing at the question, Bayless let it land with a thud.

“All of the women were known commodities,” she replied flatly. “They’d all had a lot of experience. It wasn’t all that surprising
they were elected.”

That was it. I tried again, pitching Bayless another easy one. Of course the candidates had a lot of experience, I said. But
a band of sisters had grasped hands, then burst through the glass ceiling. Didn’t she see that as a remarkable accomplishment?

Bayless let this question, too, land with a thud. “The gender thing was remarked on after the election,” she said. “Before
the election, it wasn’t. It wasn’t a factor. Not to the voters—and not to us.”

Without thinking about it, I realized, I had taken it for granted that Bayless would follow one of two scripts. In the first
script, she would have championed the GOP as a vehicle for women’s progress. “It’s no accident that nearly all the women elected
in 1998 were Republicans,” Bayless would have said. “The GOP is breaking down barriers for women at every level. Republican
women are on the march.” In the second script, Bayless would have given vent to feminist frustrations with the GOP. “The way
the Republican Party has treated women is outrageous,” Bayless would have said. “The GOP should drop the pro-life plank from
its platform. It should drop its support for guns. It should embrace affirmative action for women. And now that I’m a high
official, I intend to do all I can to see that the GOP does just that.”

But both scripts would have dealt with women as a class, not as individuals. Bayless herself didn’t see women that way. She
had just told me that she was a Republican because she believed in individual responsibility. She had succeeded in her own
struggle because she had taken charge of her life, worked hard, and asked to be judged only on her merits. Now here she was,
the second-ranking official in the entire state of Arizona. I could toss her all the softball questions about gender politics
that I wanted. Betsey Bayless wouldn’t play.

When I asked about the GOP’s support for guns, Bayless shrugged. In Arizona, she explained, guns weren’t much of an issue
because westerners felt so comfortable with them. “Even women?” I pressed. Bayless smiled. “Women can use guns, too,” she
said. When I asked about abortion, Bayless replied that her own position was in the middle. She disliked abortion. But she
couldn’t see permitting the government to ban it. “Arizona already has a law that makes partial birth abortions illegal,”
Bayless said. “I think that makes sense. I think most women do, too.” Would it help the GOP appeal to women if it dropped
the pro-life plank from its platform? “The Republican Party is a great big party,” Bayless replied. “There’s plenty of room
for different views.”

Leaving Bayless’s office, I found myself wondering how I was going to justify the cost of my flight to Phoenix. I had come
to the high desert to get a woman’s view of the Republican Party. When I got it, I couldn’t tell it apart from a man’s.

* * *

Next I went downstairs to the office of the state treasurer, Carol Springer. Springer is a gal. If Phoenix had been Dodge
City, she would have been Miss Kitty. In her early sixties, she has blond hair piled high on her head, high cheekbones, and
a look that lets you know that while you’re talking she’s sizing you up.

Springer moved to Phoenix from Oregon thirty years ago. Shortly thereafter, her husband walked out on her, leaving her to
raise their five children. Deciding that it would be easier to keep an eye on her brood in a small town, Springer moved to
Prescott, about eighty miles north of Phoenix, where the principal industries were ranching and mining (Prescott has since
become a center of high tech). Springer supported her family as a real estate agent. “I raised those children on my own,”
Springer, seated at her desk, told me. “I’ve been independent a long time now.”

In 1990 Springer ran for the Arizona senate. She didn’t want to. The man who already represented Prescott in the senate was
a friend. But the economy was, as she put it, “in the pits,” and when the legislature enacted a tax hike, her friend, the
Prescott senator, cast the deciding vote. “If you want to help the economy,” Springer said, disgusted, “you don’t raise taxes.
That’s just logic.” Springer tried to get someone else to run against her friend. When no one would, she reluctantly decided
to announce against him herself. All she wanted to do was send her friend the message that he ought to think twice before
voting for any more tax hikes. He refused to take her seriously. “When I called him up to tell him I was running, he just
laughed and laughed,” Springer said. That left her with no choice. She had to wage a campaign. “I had no money. I never held
a fund-raiser. All I talked about was that one issue, taxes.” Springer won by two hundred out of eighteen thousand votes.
“On election night,” she said, “the two most surprised people were my opponent and me.”

Springer served in the Arizona senate eight years. The GOP controlled the body for six of those years, allowing Springer and
her fellow Republicans to win the passage of nearly all the legislation they wanted. They enacted charter school legislation.
They reformed the state welfare system. They reformed the entire state budget process. Springer enjoyed the senate just as
long as she and her fellow Republicans were getting things done. But when Arizona’s Republicans seemed to lose their sense
of initiative—at just about the same time, as it happened, that Republicans in Washington lost theirs—Springer grew impatient.
“During the Contract with America time we had real goals. But now it’s like we’re just kind of going along.”

Bored with the senate, Springer decided to run for state treasurer. She knew she would have less influence over policy than
she had in the senate. But in reforming the state budget process she had learned the ins and outs of state finances, and she
believed she would enjoy the work.