Michael Nelson: Newsweek's Woman Problem

[Michael Nelson: a former editor of The Washington Monthly, is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Among his most recent books are How the South Joined the Gambling Nation: The Politics of State Policy Innovation, with John Lyman Mason, and The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1787-2008, with Sidney M. Milkis. He is currently writing books about the 1968 election and the 2008 election.]

Newsweek’s cover this week promises to explain “What Women Want.” The first sentence of its cover story begins: “When Walter Mondale chose New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in 1984, he set off the briefest of crazes.”

Newsweek ought to know. Right after the 1984 Democratic convention, it placed Ferraro on the cover of its July 23 issue. One story was headlined: “Ferraro’s First Week: Men and Women Alike Wept and Cheered.” Another predicted: “Ferraro will tame most of the lions she confronts.” A Gallup Poll commissioned by the magazine showed that Mondale-Ferraro now trailed Reagan-Bush by only 2 percentage points. By a margin of 52 percent to 26 percent, voters said that Mondale’s choice of Ferraro made them more likely to vote for the Democratic ticket.

By Election Day, of course, the bloom was long off the rose. Ferraro’s thin credentials—less than three terms in the House of Representatives, with no foreign policy experience—gradually impressed themselves on many who were initially excited by the novelty of her selection. As Michelle Cottle writes in the current issue of The New Republic, Ferraro became “a punch line.” Reagan carried 49 states, including Ferraro’s home state of New York, and won 56 percent of the women’s vote, up 10 points from his first election in 1980.

Will John McCain pay a similar price for his equally surprising choice of the almost-as-inexperienced Sarah Palin? I think he will. As a human being Palin is vastly appealing; I count myself one of her fans. But at the end of the day I expect most voters to ask themselves the following question and to answer it in the negative: “How confident am I that if something should happen to the 73-year-old (going on 77 by the end of the term), cancer-surviving McCain, Sarah Palin is ready to step in and serve as president?”...