Alison Lundergan Grimes is running for the Senate in an attempt to unseat the upper chamber’s Republican leader, and she has a message for the voters: she’s a she. As the Washington Post reports:
Often appearing in a brightly colored dress, Grimes repeatedly refers to her wardrobe in her campaign addresses, even talking about her high heels. She calls herself a “strong Kentucky woman” or an “independent Kentucky woman” and, as she did Tuesday night, describes her grandmother as “one of the fiercest Kentucky women I know.” …
“This is a Kentucky woman through and through, who proudly wears a dress,” she said at one of her final stops along a statewide bus tour that culminated with Tuesday’s primary.…
She wasn’t done talking about what she was wearing.
“I have stood strong in these heels,” she said shortly after her speech in a brief interview inside her bus. “I’ve run circles around [McConnell] in this state in my heels, and we’re going to continue to do that.”
This is an interesting tactic to highlight the Democrats’ invented and condescending “war on women.” But there are good reasons for it–most notably, she would prefer not to talk policy or the issues, since her party is so hostile to Kentucky voters’ concerns.
As the Associated Press reports, Grimes is trying desperately to avoid taking a position on whether she’d have supported ObamaCare. The president’s health-care reform law is unpopular, and Grimes no doubt would like to benefit from the fact that she was not in Congress when Democrats voted for a terrible bill they hadn’t read out of blind loyalty to their dear leader.
At the same time, Grimes doesn’t want to take a stand against it, not least because demonstrating the consensus against ObamaCare would only highlight the fact that her election would further enable ObamaCare’s destructive consequences.
So she’s simply repeating over and over again that she’s wearing a dress–“She paused, looked down at her strawberry-red outfit, and let the crowd of a few dozen supporters whoop and holler at the inside joke,” the Post explains after Grimes told the crowd she “proudly wears a dress.”
There are pitfalls to this strategy as well. Grimes is a seasoned partisan, but she seems to have made a classic rookie mistake along the lines of Christine O’Donnell:
Alison Lundergan Grimes says it everywhere she goes. She said it at dozens of stops in Kentucky over the past week. She said it at her victory speech here Tuesday night after securing the Democratic nomination for Senate. And she plans to say it again all the way to November. She’s not an “empty dress.”
Ever since a Republican strategist used the insult months ago to belittle the 35-year-old Grimes, she has made it a rallying point in her quest to dislodge the Senate’s GOP leader, Mitch McConnell, from the Kentucky seat he has held for three decades.
Everywhere she goes she proclaims she’s not an empty dress? Not only does that come across as defensive, it reminds the crowds of the accusation. This is where the “war on women” rhetoric poses a challenge. Democrats don’t think women are smart enough or capable enough to out-debate and out-campaign their opponents on the issues, so they’ve instructed them to play the victim. But that requires Democratic women to consistently raise the idea that they can’t win on the merits.
If Grimes has already internalized the Democratic Party’s belief that women are inferior candidates, she’s going to have an uphill climb in a Senate election. Additionally, the “war on women” claims open the left up to accusations of hypocrisy. A notable example this election season was when Oregon Democrats spurred overly personal attacks on a Republican victim of domestic violence. The creepy attacks were meant to help Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley.
It’s too soon to tell whether that will backfire on Merkley, but Grimes is now under fire for a bizarre false attack on McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao. Specifically, Grimes attacked the family’s wealth after Chao’s mother passed away and left her daughter an inheritance. Grimes suggested Chao’s inheritance money was actually ill-gotten gains McConnell accrued in the Senate.
This is just the beginning of the campaign, so it’s possible Grimes will get her footing. Hopefully the attack on Chao over her deceased mother represents a low point for Grimes’s campaign and it’ll be uphill from here. Perhaps she’ll also find a communications team smart enough to tell her to stop announcing she’s not an empty dress. Either way, the Grimes campaign thus far is a good indication of the damage the Democrats’ “war on women” is doing to political discourse.