Cherchez la femme:
Deedy, John
powers of Congress is the center of energy for our present federal system, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin's argument at the 1787 Constitutional Convention against...
...The Emmanuel forum clinches that point, while at the same time establishing a bigger challenge: getting Ronald Reagan to debate gender-gap issues between now and November 6. The odds on that are not good...
...A New York Times/CBS poll in December, for instance, had men approving of President Reagan's positions by 57 to 32 percent, but this approval narrowed to 43 to 37 percent among women...
...Common weal: ! 04 Given the locale of a Catholic campus, some thought that abortion would be the touchiest topic of the evening...
...Yet Mr...
...Mondale, arch and maybe a mite cautious...
...but move to other -- arms control and defense, the environment, the delivery of social services, abortion included-- and a significant difference begins to display itself in male/female perceptions and attitudes...
...Election '84 CHERCHEZ LA FENNE THE DEMOCRATIC DEBATES I B Y NOW EVERYONE sees it: the gender gap in American politics...
...The point was well made by Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, who was reported to have said, as he held up the deficit-laden FY 1985 Budget which the president himself had submitted to Congress: "The president has all the authority he needs to veto anything in here...
...D ETRACTORS OF the International Monetary Fund (IMF) claim that the stringent conditions it imposes on thirdworld borrowing nations force their poor and middleclass populations to make sacrifices so that their governments can meet obligations to foreign private banks...
...It wasn't...
...Never before had a presidential-candidates' debate been devoted exclusively to the subject...
...As Boston Globe columnist Robert Turner observed, it does not necessarily follow that presidential politics in 1984 is going to develop as some kind of latter-day Thurberesque battle of the sexes, but it does mean that women are being talked to and listened to in ways that are very new...
...Not surprisingly, the six Democratic presidential candidates who showed for the debate -- Mondale, Glenn, Hart, Hollings, McGovern and Jackson -- strove to surpass one another in being supportive and sympathetic to women's concerns on everything from pay equity to military spending, the national budget, human services, unemployment, inflation, child care, equal fights, civil fights, foreign policy...
...Would he turn around to a man or a woman...
...Each member of Congress would be required to bargain with the president to obtain local appropriations...
...Possessing definite political instincts and opinions, and comprising 53.5 percent of the electorate, women have the potential to teach the two major political parties a costly lesson or two...
...Venezuela's uniqueness lies in its relative economic stability which is underpinned by an exceptionally high per capita revenue derived from oil exports...
...So of course there was no clear loser either...
...The case of Venezuela -- more than those of its heavily indebted Latin American neighbors -- demonstrates the importance of receiving the IMF's "seal of approval" and how, in practice, the fund acts as a virtual agent of the private banks...
...Glenn concurred on the homemakers point, but only in passing...
...The IMF's plans for economic recovery coincide with what the banks themselves would put forward if given the opportunity...
...This "seal of approval" facilitates (and in some cases is a sine qua non for) renegotiation with the commercial banks...
...As with previous debates between the candidates, there was no clear winner of the gender-gap debate, probably because the evening developed as more of a love feast than a debate...
...Given the hour, said Hart to laughter, it would probably be Lee, meaning his wife...
...Hollings was smooth...
...The IMF's defenders respond that the fund's recommendations are aimed at guaranteeing its own loans which represent an appreciable percentage of all international lending...
...Reagan's own pollster, Richard Wirthlin, documents a gender gap...
...The candidates-appeared before the panelists in sets of threes, and Shanahan did ask Jackson, Hollings, and Mondale for their positions on sex education, including contraceptive information, and public funding for abortion...
...Instead it committed itself to the education of women, and took on a whole new feminist image...
...One reason was that the question period was briefer than planned, and managed rather than open...
...Under the cosponsorship of Emmanuel and Women in Politics '84, a nonpartisan coalition of individuals and women's organizations formed to maximize women's participation in electoral politics, six Democratic presidential candidates were brought together to debate the gender gap...
...Reagan's upcoming campaign, as with that of every president, is predicated on rebuilding and maintaining an election coalition that has been nurtured throughout his term...
...In arguing for the item veto, the Wall Street Journal states that while Congress "represents diverse interests of 435 districts and various coalitions," the president "represents a national constituency...
...JOHN DEEDY (John Deedy, former managing editor of Commonweal, writes from a converted barn on Cape Ann...
...Most bases were touched -- six times...
...While other nations desperately negotiate with the IMF for short-term loans to provide them with precious breathing space, Venezuela's main interest 24 February 1984:105...
...Shed was the Stereotype of a Catholic women's college which existed primarily to train young ladies to be good teachers and good housewives for young men coming off the campuses of Boston College in nearby Newton Heights and Holy Cross College in Worcester, forty miles west...
...Still, if the debate produced no clear-cut winner, the evening did...
...Reagan, that "national constituency" is not likely to include many blacks or poor...
...John Glenn won the celebrity cup, attracting a trail of adoring groupies and most of the portable TV cameras and microphones...
...So what better idea than to use this newly discovered strength, and arrange that the presidential candidates debate issues of particular interest to women and in a context determined not by men strategists but by women themselves...
...it was not a night to chance comparisons to Cushing...
...In sum, the convergence was on women as a liberated, unassailable species...
...He has the president's approval rating among women lagging a full nine points behind that of men...
...Pork-barrel would still exist in appropriations, but it would be at the president's acquiescence and to his advantage...
...In so many ways the setting was as auspicious as the debate itself...
...Of course, the private banks themselves could draw up and impose their own set of conditions, but they would not be as morally binding as those of a public institution like the IMF...
...In this sense the IMF either consciously or unwittingly represents the interests of the private sector in spite of the fund's public character and its theoretical commitment to the well-being of its constituent nations...
...Everyone came away with something...
...This is precisely what happened recently at Emmanuel College in Boston...
...As agile and graceful as a Sugar Ray Leonard, he seemed ready to shadow box in other ihan the figurative sense...
...Jesse Jackson won the charisma award hands down...
...Benjamin Franklin's argument at the 1787 Constitutional Convention against the absolute veto -- "No good law whatever could be passed without a private bargain with him [the governor of Pennsylvania]" -- would apply with equal force to the item veto...
...Twice -- at a press briefing and before TV cameras in welcoming remarks -- she cited McCarthy's observation in a Commonweal column that "almost half the women in the House of Representatives, one of the two women Cabinet members, and many state and local office holders" come from all-women's colleges such as Emmanuel...
...The tie-in between the IMF and the private banks is apparent in the conditions that it attaches to emergency loans which, when granted, represent a tacit endorsement of the nation's economic policies...
...Report from Venezuela SUBVERSION, IMF-STYLE WHY LET IT BE A FRONT FOR THE BANKS...
...Another was that the panel of questioners --- Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe, Eileen Shanahan of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Carole Simpson of ABC News -- chose not to press the subject...
...JEREMIAH BARUCH (Jeremiah Baruch is the pseudonym of a Washington writer with a position in government...
...With his big lead over the others for the Democratic nomination, for him it is now a game of playing one's cards safely...
...a college where, as the the New York Times recalled, Cardinal Cushing could stand up some twenty-five years ago and tell Emmanuel students: "Aspire to the Heights, and if you don't reach the Heights, remember there is always the Cross...
...Women and men show little difference on so-called traditional women's issues like day care, the Equal Rights Amendment, and equal pay...
...He had it from the minute he entered the hall and bounded up the stairs throwing kisses to the applause...
...Hart won the good-humor prize for his wit in handling a rather silly question about whom he would consult if a crisis came up at one o'clock in the morning...
...Any item veto authority would be well used to foster that electoral constituency, and, in the case of Mr...
...It was women and the women' s movement as a force in American politics...
...It was left to George McGovern, the original pro-feminist among the pack, to speak up for women as homemakers (scattered applause) and to chide women for expecting high office when not enough are even trying for office at the grass roots (silence...
...Cushing would be run off campus for any such whimsical comment today, and maybe by Emmanuel's president, Sister Janet Eisner, S ND, who appears more given to quoting Abigail McCarthy than archbishops of Boston...
...These differences in viewpoint raise the question of whether the IMF acts to safeguard its own investments only or those of the commercial banks as well...
...The one Democratic candidate whose presence might have provided a point of dissent, former Governor Reubin O. Askew, of Florida, was elsewhere...
...It is naive, at best, to think that the administration's budget decisions are predicated consistently upon the national interest without taking special political interests into account...
...Emmanuel College is an institution which in the early 1970s made a risky but conscious decision not to join the trend of women' s colleges to go coeducational...
...So whose line items are more apt to be struck...
...Chase Manhattan and its ilk would become convenient targets of nationalist feeling should they, rather than the IMF, make such unpopular recommendations as elimination of the government' s milk subsidy and the freezing of salaries for public employees...
...The president and his administration are under political pressures, just as is the Congress...
...McGovern, characteristically candid...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 4
