Tuesday, October 01, 2013

Pictures of the GOP Powers-That-Be


One can be found here, about the House leaders.  And then there is this:





Photo by  Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

This is all in the context of the government shutdown, but the problem is much more general.  For instance, 75.6% of the women in the House of Representatives are Democrats and only 24.4% Republicans.  Put in a different way, 29% of the House Democrats are women, only 8.2% of the House Republicans are women.

Similar patterns apply to the Senate, where 32% of Democratic Senators are women, but only 9% of Republican Senators.

The conclusions one can draw from this are interesting. 

One, pointed out by a smart reader in my earlier comments, is that there's not much chance of a gender-equal Congress as long as the Republican Party is the party of (mostly white) men. 

Another one has to do with the question whether the Republican platform really is explicitly anti-women in the sense that this is what is appealing in the party to some voters.  Perhaps there are so few Republican women in politics, because that is what the Republican ideology demands (women at home etc.) so the women don't run or perhaps the women don't get voted in, even if they run, because that is part of the party ideology. 

The causal relationships can run in different directions at the same time, too.  For instance, the Republican War on Women isn't exactly the kind of message uppity women interested in politics like to hear.

What we read in places like the conservative Townhall is that women are not Republicans because women want a Big Government Daddy to provide for them and because women aren't that smart.  So take your pick, I guess.