CBS/NY Times Poll:
But the Times/CBS News poll suggested that Ms. Palin’s selection has, to date, helped Mr. McCain only among Republican base voters; there was no evidence of significantly increased support for him among women in general. White women were evenly divided between Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama; before the conventions, Mr. McCain led Mr. Obama among white women, 44 percent to 37 percent.
By contrast, at this point in the 2004 campaign, President Bush was leading Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic challenger, by 56 percent to 37 percent among white women.
Imagine for a minute that you are a male Democrat in an alternate universe where every President of the United States, all 43 of them, have been women. In fact, every major ticket nominee in our history was a woman, and all vice-presidents were women, and most U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives are women.
Furthermore, imagine that in this world, Republicans want to appoint Supreme Court judges who will badly curtail your rights. There is no biological analogy to forced pregnancy, but let's assume that a major goal of the right wing is to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that legalized all forms of birth control, and gave those rights specifically to men. In other words, if the Republicans have their way, they will pack the court with promoters of the "Birth Promotion Act," which prevents men from buying condoms and gives wives the say-so on whether her husband can have a vasectomy. While plenty of men are either indifferent or supportive of the Birth Promotion Act, the majority of men would prefer to choose when they will have unprotected and possible baby-producing sex. As a result, most men (60%) are Democrats, since the Democrats support the men's right to choose. Most women (60%) are Republicans.
In the primary season, the first truly viable male candidate (let's call him Joe Biden) ran a strong campaign against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. He lost, men were crushed, and big supporters of Biden were further upset when Hillary chose Sen. Diane Feinstein as her running mate instead of Biden. Clinton and Feinstein are strong supporters of a man's right to choose contraception, but it would have been nice to finally see a man in power. That said, most men continue to support Hillary and the Democrats.
Meanwhile, the Republican candidate is a horrible anti-male female senator named Jane McCain. She is 72 years old, she dumped her first husband after he got into a car accident and married a rich younger guy, and she has a zero percent rating from Planned Parenthood and the various contraception groups. Jane has a history of being anti-male, fighting to prevent men from becoming combat pilots, making various cruel jokes at the expense of men, and she doesn't even support equal pay in a country where men earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to women.
Clinton and Feinstein are barely ahead in the national vote, and the trends favor them since we've had eight disastrous years of Republican rule. Jane McCain knows this, and she also knows that plenty of Democratic men are upset that Biden wasn't picked as VP. So what does she do? Recklessly, and after meeting him just once, she picks Bobby Jindall to be the VP candidate. He quickly becomes a media sensation, a game-changed, since nobody has heard of him before this.
Jindall is very young (37), he is a first term governor with "executive" experience, and he is reasonably well-spoken. A real up-and-comer in the Republican party. He energizes the Christian base with his hard core evangelical beliefs, in particular his stark opposition to birth control of any kind. He believes that when a man has sex, he has given up his right to determine whether that sex will produce offspring -- it is the woman's choice. Jindall himself has seven kids in just 10 years of marriage, affirming that he lives by this credo. He is the first male to be on the Republican party ticket, and the first male on any major party ticket since 1984.
So what do men do? Because Jindall happens to have a penis, do they blindly support him? Do they ignore that Jindall is highly unqualified for the presidency, that he opposes equal pay for men, that he is an opponent of choice, that his religious views are a bit extreme? In other words, do you throw away everything you liked about Joe Biden in order to support another man with opposite policy positions and none of the experience?
The answer, for most Democratic-leaning men, would be HELL NO. Just because he is a man doesn't mean we have to like him, and it sure doesn't mean we have to vote for him. In fact, it would be an insult to men for Jane McCain to assume this snotty unqualified extremist would satisfy our desire to see a man break the glass ceiling. Would we like to see a man in power someday? Sure. But not this man, no way, no how. Jindall is an empty suit next to Biden, as an SNL skit the next week makes clear.
And in fact, counter to Jane McCain's devious plan to pull Biden voters away from Clinton, the polling quickly shows that Jindall is actually less popular among men than he is among women. And as men get to know more about his views and lack of knowledge, the less they like him. Jindall has almost no shot in the debate against Feinstein, he has abuse of power scandals brewing in his home state, and he quickly develops a reputation for lying about his accomplishments. The possibility that Jane McCain will win the election starts to look dimmer by the day.
Jane McCain starts to look like a real idiot, especially when the economy goes into crisis and foreign affairs become paramount in the weeks before the election. Instead of selecting a running mate who could wisely discuss these matters, she picked someone who can't even do a press conference for fear of making a huge gaffe. Jindall's electrifying RNC speech fades from voters' minds, and instead they see a bumbling candidate who is clearly out of his element. It reflects badly on McCain's judgment, it continues to piss off men who deplore the tokenism of the pick and it even starts to upset serious conservatives who think of Jindall as a neophyte.
And as McCain's poll numbers start to fade, as Jindall's liabilities start to mount, the question soon becomes: will McCain replace Jindall on the ticket? Or will she ride him to certain doom in the election?
We live in interesting times, my friends.