Sunday, February 5, 2012

Women can propel Obama to Victory in November, using Elizabeth Warren's ideas and campaign example - Nearly 10 million more female than male voters in the 2008 Presidential. - Women’s vote in 2008 : 56% for Obama to 43% for McCain, thereby sealing Obama’s election

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Women will decide the 2012 Presidential Election, they decided the 2008 election for President Obama :

The New Republic
How to Win Female Votes: What Obama Can Learn From Elizabeth Warren

February 3, 2012


By Paul Starobin
Paul Starobin, author of After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, lives in Massachusetts.


How to Win Female Votes: What Obama Can Learn From Elizabeth Warren

Some excerpts :

Elizabeth Warren is poised to thrash Scott Brown in their marquee U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts, and the reason is simple: Women voters love her. In the most recent poll, in December, Warren and Brown were virtually tied amongst men, but Warren led by 13 percentage points, 51 percent to 38 percent, amongst women.
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Women not only outnumber men among registered voters—66.6 million to 63.5 million in 2010—but also are increasingly more likely to turn out to vote. In fact, the ‘turnout gap’ between women and men has grown in every election since 1980—so that in 2008, 60.4 percent of eligible women voters went to the polls, against 55.7 percent of eligible male voters, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. As a result, there were nearly 10 million more female than male voters in 2008, with women comprising 53 percent of the electorate. The women’s vote that year split 56 percent for Obama to 43 percent for McCain, thereby sealing Obama’s election.
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Polls have shown Obama's job approval rating among women dipping below 50 percent. Women are currently more supportive of him than men, but if the President can’t reignite genuine enthusiasm among them, he stands to lose the election.

The adoption of Warren’s unabashed communitarian message could perhaps help Obama rally women to his side. It would be a smooth segue from his campaign persona of four years ago: Her variation on the theme of economic togetherness could add a bass note to his own 2008 signature call for a civic inclusiveness—for a melting away of Red America and a Blue America into a united America. That was Obama at his most inspiring, and there are plenty of Americans (women especially) who would be eager to hear him offer a refurbished and more nurturing version of that idealistic appeal, one tailored to our weary economic times.

He made a good start at channeling Warren (and their Progressive heir, Theodore Roosevelt) with his speech in December at Osawatomie, Kansas that explicitly repudiated “rugged individualism” (even while acknowledging that this sentiment is “in America’s DNA”) in favor of a society in which business titans (nearly all of whom are male) are tethered to a “broader obligation.”

But it was only a start. Communitarianism is not only about ideals, but about practical action. Obama needs to talk more about his particular policy proposals and how they link up with America’s “underlying social contract,” in Warren’s phrase. That’s perhaps the most promising way to reconnect his campaign, so far lacking in any sense of grand aspiration, with its natural demographic base
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