I don’t have a lot of use for Tim James, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Alabama who cynically tried to inflame xenophobic passions in his state in the wake of national controversy over the Arizona immigration law with his viral “Language” ad. For that matter, I’m not a fan of James’ role back in 2003 in the defeat of a tax reform initiative that would have helped fix one of the world’s most regressive tax structures.
Still, you have to feel for James’ efforts to get a recount of Robert Bentley’s 167-vote margin over him for second place and a runoff spot in the June 1 primary, which would have happened automatically at public expense in many states. Instead, in Alabama, counts have to be challenged in individual counties, with the challenger bearing the entire cost (in this case several hundred thousand smackeroos). James fished in, but just as the recount was about to begin, lame-duck Republican Attorney General Troy King (who was trounced on June 1 in a renomination bid) weighed in with an opinion saying that candidates can’t get a recount until a nomination is final, and that won’t happen until the runoff is over.
So Tim James can’t spend his own money to find out if he really made the runoff until the runoff’s already happened. Catch-22.
Alabama GOP leaders are apparently mulling over what to do during the weekend, and James says he’s hasn’t given up. But sounds like a simple English-language interpretation of his situation would be: “Just fergit’ it.”

If you want to hear how loudly money can talk in politics, check out the new Quinnipiac survey in Florida. Two very rich men who leapt into statewide contests very late are doing very well.
One of them is Republican Rick Scott, a former for-profit hospital exec who was forced from his job amidst a massive fraud investigation, and then won fame by putting together national-level anti-health-reform ads. He leapt into the governor’s race very late, and now, after a $7 million barrage of ads that mostly express his support for Arizona’s immigration law, he’s leading conservative warhorse Bill McCollum–whose time finally seemed to have come this year after two unsuccessful U.S. Senate races–by a 44-31 margin.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic contest for the U.S. Senate, already roiled by the independent candidacy of Gov. Charlies Crist, billionarire real estate investor Jeff Greene, who got into the race right before the end of qualifying just over a month ago, has moved into a statistical tie with congressman Kendrick Meek. Advised by Democratic bad boys Joe Trippi and Doug Schoen, Greene is playing the outsider card as hard as he can.
Neither of these guys has held public office or has any deep roots in Florida. Both have been questioned about their business ethics. But they’ve got the loot, and while political history is littered with the wreckage of ego-driven campaigns by rich people, more than a few have succeeded. And if you are Bill McCollum or Kendrick Meek, who were both focused on the general election until their rich challengers came out of the woodwork, it’s got to feel like Sisyphus watching that rock roll back to the bottom of the hill.

At Open Left, Chris Bowers calls attention to a nifty chart put together by SwingStateProject’s DavidNYC that lists every 2010 House incumbent who has failed to receive over 70% in a primary.
As Chris notes, Republicans are much more likely to have attracted ideologically-motivated primary challenges–about twice as likely, actually–despite the relatively high level of ideological cohesion among House Republicans. In fact, looking at David’s chart, support for TARP seems to be the most common reason that a Republican House member received a viable primary challenge.
Outside the one or two hot-buttons motivating the Tea Party movement, Republicans don’t really have that many issues wiith each other, now that they’ve all agreed that Ronald Reagan is the truth and light on all issues, and that the only deadly sin is to even think about raising taxes. But if any GOPer forgets these guiding principles–or in many parts of the country, takes anything less than full-on Christian Right positions on abortion or same-sex marriage–a primary challenge is right around the corner.

The MSM is having quite a gush-fest about the Fiorina and Whitman primary wins in California. Fresh faces, huge amounts of campaign cash, historic wins for GOP women and all that. Dem nominees Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer begin their races dwarfed by a tidal wave of overwhelmingly favorable coverage for their opponents.
If not for Fiorina’s “so yesterday” gaffe about Senator Boxer’s hairdo, she would have gotten the same free ride that the bedazzled media has given Whitman since Tuesday. Boxer and Brown no doubt write it off as a familiar pattern of media coverage. The new kid usually gets the breathless MSM buzz after primaries, especially in a political year that has been roundly designated as a bummer for incumbents.
But it won’t be long before the sobering demographic realities of the California electorate force a reassessment among the punditry. In his WaPo op-ed, “Calif. GOP Primary Winners Look Headed for Defeat,” Harold Meyerson explains,

…California Republican primaries have a nasty habit of rendering their winners unelectable in November, and this year’s contest looks like it will be no exception. To win, Whitman and Fiorina — conventional conservative business Republicans both — had to take positions so far to the right that their chances of winning a state in which Barack Obama commands a 59 percent approval rating are slim. During one debate with her Republican opponents, Fiorina affirmed the right of suspected terrorists on no-fly lists to buy guns, presumably lest the gods of the National Rifle Association strike her dead on the spot. At a campaign event at Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday, Boxer, never one to let a hanging curveball go unswatted, contrasted Fiorina’s guns-to-terrorists stance with her own co-authorship of a law allowing pilots to carry guns in cockpits.

And then there is the thorniest (for Republicans) of issues:

But the issue most damaging for Whitman and Fiorina is immigration. Pressed by their GOP primary opponents and the Republican electorate to endorse Arizona’s draconian new law, Fiorina proclaimed her support for it while Whitman countered the charges from her right that she was soft on immigration by affirming that she was “100 percent against amnesty” and demanding a huge increase in border enforcement. To bolster her credibility, her ads featured former Republican governor Pete Wilson — champion of 1994’s Proposition 187, which would have denied all public services, including the right to attend primary and secondary schools, to illegal immigrants.
Wilson won reelection in 1994 by backing 187, which the courts subsequently struck down. But his victory was probably the most pyrrhic in modern American politics. Threatened and enraged by 187, California’s Latino immigrants began naturalizing, registering and voting in record numbers. Southern California’s Latino-led labor movement — the most energized and strategically savvy labor movement in the nation — became particularly adept at turning out Latino voters for Democratic candidates and causes.
…the California electorate has been transformed — moving the state decisively into the Democratic column. In the 1994 election, according to the nonprofit William C. Velásquez Institute, which seeks to raise minorities’ political and economic participation, Latinos counted for 11.4 percent of California voters. By 2008, they comprised 21.4 percent. And particularly when immigration is an issue, theirs is a heavily Democratic vote. “There’s a whole generation of Latino voters who don’t believe the Republicans look out for them,” Maria Elena Durazo, who heads the Los Angeles County AFL-CIO, told me on Election Day. “We ran against Pete Wilson for years after he was out of office. And, voilà! He’s back — he’s vouching for Whitman!” Labor will make sure the Latino community knows it. Already, the California Nurses Association is running an ad on Spanish-language radio that splices in a clip from a Whitman primary commercial in which she and Wilson discuss cracking down on immigration.

Meyerson concludes,

It’s not just that Republican nativism pushes perhaps a fifth of the electorate into the Democratic column. It’s that the state’s Republicans are simply far to the right of the majority of Californians — so much so that they do not have a majority of registered voters in any one of the state’s 53 congressional districts…In winning their nominations, they [Whitman and Fiorina] said things deeply offensive to a fatally large swath of California voters. Their campaigns may be gold-plated, but they have ears of purest tin.

Add to that the fact that Jerry Brown may be one of the most battle-seasoned candidates in history, having won grueling campaigns for Governor of California, Mayor of Oakland, CA Attorney-General and having won and lost presidential primaries. The media didn’t cover his comments well, but Brown will not be giving Whitman an easy time of it. He has already blasted Whitman for spending $71 million on her primary campaign, and added in his recent press conference,

“She paid herself $120 million, and then EBay had to lay off 10 percent of its workforce. Now, is that waste and abuse? Is that what you want?”

In stark contrast, Brown had an impressive record of budget management and job creation during his stint as governor, while living a life of unprecedented austerity for the chief executive of the nation’s largest state. As Brown noted in his news conference,

When I was governor of California, we built up the largest surplus in history — $4.5 billion. We created 1.9 million jobs. We reduced taxes by billions

Whitman has already gone into handler-imposed seclusion, issuing lame statements about Brown’s website not being up to snuff and bragging about her issues brochure, which Brown derided for being lavishly illustrated with photos, but way short on substance. Californians worried about their job security, pensions and education of their children are not likely to prefer Whitman’s track record to Brown’s.
As for Fiorina, last year the biz rag web site ‘Condé Nast Portfolio’ designated Fiorina as one of “The 20 Worst American CEOs of All Time“, noting also,

A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005…HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.

Not a track record to inspire working people to vote for her, either.
If Whitman and Fiorina had been business leaders who had track records of living modestly while keeping concerns for their employees front and center, maybe Brown and Boxer would have more to worry about. As Republicans, however, both Fiorina and Whitman have more in common with Gordon Gekko than Abe Lincoln. The guess here is that the working people of California ain’t having it.

The big development in non-election news from Washington this week has been the collapse of bipartisan negotiations for cap-and-trade legislation, caused by Sen. Lindsey Graham’s defection. Said defection has been a long time in the making; earlier Graham broke off longstanding negotiations with Sens. Kerry and Lieberman on climate change, allegedly because he was angry with Harry Reid for hinting that immigration reform might come first in the Senate. Now that Reid’s backed off that idea, Graham’s been forced to more or less flip-flop entirely on climate change, and is now backing a far less ambitious bill introduced by Richard Lugar that would have no cap on carbon emissions.
The CW has suggested that Graham’s happy feet on climate change is the product of pressure from his Republican colleagues in Congress who don’t want any “cap-and-tax” bill and basically don’t want any cooperation with the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. But I think the problem may be a little closer to home for Graham.
Earlier this year, a couple of Republican county committees down in South Carolina raised eyebrows with censure resolutions aimed at Graham for his support for cap-and-trade, comprehensive immigration reform, and TARP. One of those committees was from Lexington County, which happens to be the residence of Nikki Haley, who then became the only gubernatorial candidate to embrace Graham’s censure for ideological heresy.
Now maybe it’s a coincidence that Graham threw in the towel on cap-and-trade the day after Haley became a national political rock star in the wake of her strong (49%) performance in the SC Republican gubernatorial primary, but maybe it’s not. Graham won’t be up for re-election until 2014, but as Bob Dylan once said (though not in the context of climate change): “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
I bring this up in part as a reminder to progressives who are naturally sympathetic to Haley as a woman and as a minority member who has been accused without much evidence of being a cheat and a liar, and called a “raghead” to boot. That’s all well and good, but don’t forget she is also a serious hard-core conservative who eagerly identifies herself with the Jim DeMint, take-no-prisoners wing of her party, and who may have just played a role in blowing up what was once a promising effort to deal with one of the most important challenges facing the country and the world. To be sure, she should be judged on her ideas and record and not subjected to gender-based double standards or sexual innuendo. But make no mistake, her “ideas” are really bad from any progressive point of view. She’s only a breath of fresh air in SC politics if you think, like she does, that the good ol’ boys who’ve been running things are dangerously liberal.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic.
As several recent surveys make clear, concern about deficits and debt is rising sharply. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey conducted in early May showed that the share of individuals rating “the deficit and government spending” as the top priority for the federal government to address has jumped since January from 13 to 20 percent–second only to job creation and economic growth. According to Gallup, “federal government debt” now ties with terrorism for the top spot in perceived threats to our future well-being. It is entirely possible that we are reaching an inflection point in public attitudes that will force the political system to change course.
Indeed, as Janet Hook shows in a well-reported piece in Monday’s Los Angeles Times, concerns about the deficit are already forcing congressional Democrats to scale back ambitious plans for continuing stimulus. Hook quotes Mark Mellman, a pollster who has long worked with Democrats, as saying that “there’s no question that people are almost as concerned about the deficit and government spending as about jobs. It is not just about the actual dollars–it is a metaphor for wasted money and lack of discipline and long-term economic decline.” A near-identical complex of concerns created an opening for a third-party presidential movement that garnered 19 percent of the vote in 1992 and strengthened the case for the policy of fiscal restraint Bill Clinton adopted in 1993.
All of this raises the question of whether public sentiment coincides with sound economics. A pretty good case can be made that it did in the 1990s, although it’s also possible to argue that the U.S. economy got a special boost during that decade from information technology and the winding-down of the Cold War. Today, many economists fear that we may be headed for a replay of Japan’s “lost decade” of slow growth, which in our case would condemn us to historically high levels of long-term unemployment.
That raises another question: What can the United States learn from the Japanese experience that should shape our own policy choices during this decade? This is more than an academic question, and the discussion cannot be confined to professional economists. After all, how to deal effectively with the twin challenges of economic growth and fiscal sustainability will be this decade’s dominant domestic policy debate.
It was in that context that I waded (some would say blundered) into a public colloquy with Paul Krugman and his legions of supporters. In the process, I discovered that Japan’s lost decade is surprisingly difficult to decode and that much of the data doesn’t mean what it appears to. Because Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics seems to be the generally acknowledged guru of Japanese economics studies, I turned to a lecture he delivered at LSE last month. Posen argues that when the Japanese employed traditional Keynesian stimulus, it worked in the ways that conventional theory would predict and that the recovery faltered when the government unwisely pulled back from stimulative policies. (In that respect, Japanese policies in the late 1990s were akin to FDR’s turn toward restraint after 1936, which halted the recovery and renewed the decline.) Posen sums up as follows:

Note, however, that this assessment is not a blank check for unlimited fiscal stimulus at every time, everywhere. Japan in the 1990s was where fiscal activism should have worked the best, being closed, with passive highly home-biased savers, and a large economy with essentially no foreign indebtedness. Having a low government share in GDP and a low tax base also means the distortions incurred by sustained fiscal expansions are of relatively low cost. Looking at today’s world, only the U.S. shares these attributes with Japan, and can thus afford to engage in ongoing fiscal stimulus in a protracted recession–and the lesser passivity of U.S. savers and increasing American foreign indebtedness suggest some limit will be reached. [Italics mine]

In short, the United States can go down Japan’s road, but not as far. In that respect, the U.S. stands between Japan and the UK, whose economy is far less closed than Japan’s and whose public sector is much larger. (To judge from the important speech Prime Minister David Cameron gave on June 7, he agrees with Posen’s assessment and has decided to attack public spending frontally.)
To get a better handle on how far the U.S. can venture down the road of sustained fiscal stimulus, I turned next to an important survey, “Activist Fiscal Policy to Stabilize Economic Activity,” written by two macroeconomists, Berkeley’s Alan J. Auerbach and my Brookings colleague William Gale. In a key section of their paper, titled “Short-Term Stimulus with Long-Term Deficits,” they state that “there are many reasons to think fiscal policies would have different effects if they are adopted during a period of fiscal stress than they would otherwise. … [F]iscal consolidations have less contractionary effects when adopted under fiscal stress, as measured by high debt and projected government spending relative to GDP.”
In plain English: the higher spending and public debt go, the stronger the economic case for fiscal restraint. At some point, serious deficit reduction ceases to be a green eye-shade exercise and becomes essential for sustainable economic growth. But when? After summarizing the grim prognosis for U.S. deficits and debt during this decade and beyond, Auerbach and Gale formulate the choice as follows:

[P]olicy makers will need to decide when to cut off stimulus and start imposing fiscal discipline. Cutting off stimulus too soon could plunge the economy into a new downturn, as happened to the United States in 1937 and Japan in 1997. Letting stimulus run for too long could ignite investors’ fears and create a ‘hard landing’ scenario.

In retrospect, Keynesians agree that U.S. and Japanese policymakers underprovided fiscal stimulus, given the length and severity of the crises they faced. If we were sure that we are now up against a comparable crisis, then the case for continued stimulus would be compelling. But the problem is that we aren’t sure, and we do know that as public spending and deficits continue to rise, the risks that come with excessive debt accumulation increase significantly.

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For those of us in the politics biz, last night was a long night, with returns trickling out over a eight hour period. Despite the best efforts of headline writers to impose some order on the ten primaries, one runoff, and one special election runoff, there was no overriding pattern or big theme to these elections: just a lot of individual contests whose importance we mostly won’t even know until November. I won’t try to cover everything that happened; you can consult news sources for detailed results. But there were some pretty interesting happenings.
The biggest surprise for the chattering classes (and I’ll plead innocence on this one, since I consistently labeled it as too close to call) was the survival of Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, whose dominant performance in Pulaski County (Little Rock), her opponent’s home base, was crucial. The heavy commitment of resources by the labor movement on behalf of Bill Halter will be second-guessed for quite some time. And once again, it’s been established that you don’t mess with Bill Clinton in his old stomping grounds.
Probably the second biggest story of the night was Nikki Haley, who came within an eyelash of winning the SC Republican gubernatorial nomination without a runoff. Congressman Gresham Barrett finished a distant second, and is already getting pressure to drop out save the GOP the trouble of a runoff. It’s clear in retrospect that the maelstrom of the last two weeks, in which Haley was hit with two separate poorly documented allegations of marital infidelity, gave her a significant sympathy vote and all but extinguished the ability of her opponents to get any kind of message out. Meanwhile, state rep. Vincent Sheheen scored an impressive majority win in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, and can now spend his time raising money and watching future developments, if any, in the Haley saga.
The third biggest story of the night was in Nevada, where the easy victory of Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle in the Republican Senate primary gave Harry Reid the matchup he wanted for November. Angle benefitted from the implosion of long-time front-runner Sue Lowden, and from national conservative support. Third-place finisher Danny Tarkanian faded in the clutch even more than Lowden.
Speaking of the Tea Folk, their movement had a very mixed evening. Establishment Republican candidates turned back Tea Party-affiliated challengers in Virginia and New Jersey. But in SC, congressman Bob Inglis, who made the mistake of voting for TARP, was knocked into a runoff by local DA Trey Gowdy, and will be the heavy underdog going forward.
One result with significant 2012 implications was in Iowa, where as expected, former Gov. Terry Branstad beat conservative firebrand Bob Vander Plaats for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. But given his many advantages in the race, Branstad’s 9-point margin of victory was underwhelming, and should warn potential presidential candidates that the social conservative forces represented by Vander Plaats could be more formidable than ever in the 2012 caucuses. Certainly Sarah Palin, whose late endorsement of Branstad enraged some of her Iowa fans, will need to do some repair work if she’s interested in entering the contest that will begin in Iowa.
And finally, in a result that got virtually no national attention but that could prove important down the road, California voters approved Proposition 14, which abolishes party primaries in favor of a “jungle primary” in which the top two finishers, regardless of political affiliation, meet in a runoff if no candidate wins 50%.

The high-profile primary elections went pretty much as expected, with the exception of the Lincoln-Halter race in Arkansas, which pundits are calling an upset for Sen. Lincoln, who won by 4 percent. The Arkansas race was certain to be a tough experience for many Democrats, regardless of who won. The way it worked out, progressive Dems got a double dose of the pain.
Not only were progressives hugely disappointed by Lt. Governor Halter’s loss — he was an impressive candidate, who many believed could be a rising star in the Democratic party and who had momentum in the polls. In addition, Lincoln’s victory was tainted by unprecedented union-bashing from a Democratic incumbent and her surrogates, including former President Clinton. Whether Lincoln could have won without it will remain a topic for debate. But, if she loses a close race in November because of weak union support, the folly of the strategy will become clear.
There is no doubt, however, about the wisdom of bringing in the Big Dog, whose popularity is squared in Arkansas. President Clinton, whose 8 years in the white house were characterized by peace and a healthy economy, is still Elvis in his home state. Credit Lincoln with good strategy in leveraging his popularity, especially in today’s troubled economic environment.
Whether or not the union-bashing helped Lincoln, there is some potential for long-term damage here, especially if other Democratic candidates embrace it. In the long run, the Democratic Party needs a strong union movement to build a real progressive majority. Victories won with union-bashing are ultimately divisive and may well end up serving GOP candidates, even in a state with relatively low union power, like Arkansas. Alternatively, if we can only win by disparaging an institution that is the first line of defense for working people in their quest for decent living standards, who the hell are we?
For unions, a couple of lessons of Lincoln’s win come into focus. 1. Be ready for union-bashing. There will likely be more of it in other races. 2. Develop stronger media resources — a national labor movement cable channel with local programming capability is long overdue. Regarding the latter, union GOTV efforts are still an invaluable asset for Dems in many races. But the labor movement urgently needs an energetic nation-wide educational campaign, utilizing more than bumper stickers. Unions must do a better job of educating Americans about all that organized labor has done to create the middle class. They must also adapt their organizing strategy to fit the changing work force so they can grow again. With such a twin-pronged strategy, the labor movement can begin to create a climate in which no smart Democrat would dare to win votes by trashing unions.
I have to agree with WaPo columnist Chris Cillizza’s assessment that, despite all of the jabber about “a strong anti-incumbent wind” blowing around the country, “Lincoln’s victory provides — yet more — evidence that candidates and campaigns matter.” I would also agree with Open Left‘s Chris Bowers that Lincoln’s strong position on Wall St. reform helped her.
But the salient lesson of Lincoln’s primary win for Democrats won’t become clear until November 2nd. She has to do what she can to rebuild bridges to Arkansas progressives, especially unions, which won’t be easy. Lincoln can’t afford to write off any pro-Democratic constituency.
Even more important is her campaign’s ability to attack Republican nominee John Boozman, who leads in polls at this point, and inculcate the meme that he is a rubber-stamp for corporate interests, who wants to repeal Social Security and a liability for Arkansas working people. This should be possible, given Boozman’s track record as a garden-variety Republican who routinely votes with his party (97 percent of the time in the current congress) in support of big business and the wealthy against the interests of the middle class.

In recent days an important discussion has emerged among progressives about the proper strategy for the progressive movement. As Bill Scher, the Online Campaign Manager of the Campaign for America’s Future described it:

“The progressive community is somewhat divided between the folks who think Obama is doing everything he can against a broken political system and the folks that think he’s not doing enough, and that we need an independent force to push him…Are we the wingman of the Obama Administration or an outside pressure force?”

This question was expected to generate a spirited debate among progressives at the America’s Future Now conference held in Washington this week but, interestingly, the anticipated conflict did not materialize. Instead, there was a widespread consensus that – regardless of their specific evaluation of Obama – progressives were agreed on the need to build an independent movement capable of both supporting or challenging the administration as any particular case required.
As AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka put it, progressives need to be a “troublesome ally” of Obama. Campaign for America’s future co-director Robert Borosage described it as being willing to go “off the reservation” and organize independently.
The general agreement on the urgent need to build a vastly strengthened, independent progressive movement –regardless of one’s precise view of the Obama administration – reflected an extremely wide general consensus among progressive bloggers, organizational leaders and grass-roots activists across the county. Even progressives who are very firm and enthusiastic supporters of Obama did not see support for an enhanced, independent progressive movement as representing a conflict with their generally positive assessment of the Administration.
Yet, although this support for an independent progressive movement would appear to represent a distancing of progressives from Obama, in two critical respects the movement remains excessively defined — and limited — by the way it relates to him and his administration. The progressive discussion is based on two underlying assumptions– both of which need to be re-examined:
The first assumption is that, in some sense, it is the weaknesses or failures of the Obama administration that have created the urgent need for progressives to build an independent progressive movement. In many commentaries a substantial list of disappointments or compromises by the Administration are offered as the primary evidence that an independent movement is necessary.
There are two problems with this way of framing the issue. First, taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of argument suggests that an independent progressive movement might in some circumstances actually be unnecessary – if Obama had just kept a sufficient number of his campaign promises, progressives would be able to wholeheartedly support him and an independent progressive movement would not be required. Second, it leads both Obama and progressives to become perceived and defined as failures – Obama for not living up to his campaign rhetoric and progressives for not being able to make him do so.
The second assumption is that the agenda of the progressive movement will continue to be defined primarily in relation to Obama’s political and legislative objectives. The progressive position will represent a challenge from the left, but it will still be framed as a response to the administration’s initiatives rather than presented on its own terms and in relation to its own long-range objectives.
This is too narrow an agenda for an independent mass movement – a social movement needs a set of objectives larger than the goals and initiatives of any single administration.
These two assumptions will impede and limit the effectiveness of the effort to build an independent progressive movement. They need to be reconsidered and revised.

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There is understandable excitement among Republican women this year because they have high-profile women candidates running for state-wide office in CA, NV and SC. Linda Feldman of The Christian Science Monitor even has a feature article entitled “Tuesday primaries: Year of the Republican woman dawning?,” and the hopes of GOP women are high that Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Sharon Angle and Nikki Haley will up the ante when all of the primary votes are counted today.
According to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), however, the Republicans still have a ways to go before they can make a convincing case that the GOP is the party that speaks to the aspirations of American women. According to CAWP’s most recent tally, for example, here is a breakdown of women office-holders by party:

13 Democratic women U.S. senators, vs. 4 Republicans
56 Democratic women House of Reps. members, vs. 17 Republicans
3 Democratic women Governors, 3 Republican women Governors
4 Democratic women Attorneys General, vs. 0 Republican women A.G.’s
50 Democratic women holding statewide office in the U.S., vs. 21 Republican women
70.5 percent of women state senators are Democrats, vs. 27.2 percent Republicans
70.3 percent of women state legislators are Democrats, vs. 29.4 percent Republicans

It’s an interesting phenomenon. You would think some smart journalist would call out the Republicans and ask them to explain the gap between the two parties. For Dems, however, our goal should be to recruit and elect more women candidates until something resembling gender parity among Democratic office-holders is a reality.