Home > Political Insider > Archives > 2009 > January > 11 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USOf Karen Handel and Republican women
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Secretary of State Karen Handel has been making phone calls to Republican activists around the state, assuring them that she is, indeed, running for governor.
A public announcement will come shortly, but the tea leaves have been there for the reading — and include the fact that Handel attended a pair of events last year associated with the Republican Governors Association, an organization in which Sonny Perdue still plays a significant role.
Handel has already sketched out a staff. The campaign is to be headed by Marty Ryall, who ran the unsuccessful re-election bid of U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.).
The well-respected Whit Ayres will be in charge of polling. TV ad specialist Fred Davis of California, who was behind last summer’s “Barack Obama-as-celebrity” ad, will handle Handel’s video.
It is a talented yet expensive team that presumes Handel’s ability to raise a great deal of money. The first-term secretary of state has yet to collect a dime for the 2010 contest — while her two GOP rivals, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and state Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, have already raised more than $1 million each.
Handel’s entry into the race has two implications that could very well be connected. First, all three suburban candidates must presume that an 18-month slog will result in a run-off between two of them. The prospect will thrill Democrats.
A Handel campaign for governor also guarantees that, in Georgia, the GOP debate over gender and politics won’t end with Sarah Palin.
Breaking through has always been tough for female politicians in Georgia, regardless of party. With only a few exceptions, the General Assembly that convenes Monday in Atlanta remains the most exclusive and powerful men’s club in the state.
But Republican women readily acknowledge that the glass ceiling is thicker on their side. Possibly because Democratic women skew slightly younger, perhaps because many Christian conservatives with influence in the GOP discourage the idea of female leadership.
Millie Rogers, president of the Georgia Federation of Republican Women, thinks money is another reason. Republicans have no Win List, a group that provides seed cash to Democratic female candidates in Georgia. “Without money you don’t have a seat at the table,” Rogers said. Her group is exploring the idea of starting such a fund.
Rogers hasn’t taken a side in the Republican race for governor. But she said that Handel will be entering the contest at a time when GOP women are feeling particularly “resentful.”
Part of the resentment stems from the treatment Palin received during the 2008 presidential campaign, and what many Republican women see as the media’s failure to recognize the unorthodox career paths that they’re often forced to take.
But there was also a Georgia-specific incident last month that still has GOP women steamed.
U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss had just won his run-off election, trouncing Democrat Jim Martin. But during the celebration, state GOP chairman Sue Everhart — the party’s first female leader — was barred from the stage where congratulations were being handed out. And Everhart had written the check for the stage.
The Chambliss campaign said the slight was unintentional and apologized profusely. But many Republican women saw the gaffe as just another example of their envelope-stuffing status.
Bettye Chambers, a long-time Gwinnett activist, wrote a blistering e-mail that traveled up and down the ranks of GOP volunteers, which trend heavily female, denouncing what she called the “blight” on Chambliss’ victory. “We are past the era of just sitting silently and not taking a stand,” she said afterwards.
It would be poor strategy on Handel’s part to peddle herself as the GOP’s female candidate. And both Cagle and Oxendine have solid records of attracting the support of women voters.
But a natural constituency can provide an invaluable edge in a three-way race. And if nothing else, Handel’s candidacy could give Republican women that seat at the table they’ve wanted — the one that’s often mistaken for a pedestal.
Comments
By JustWondering
January 11, 2009 3:23 PM | Link to this
Why the AJC turns this into a women thing?
By Will Jones
January 11, 2009 10:36 PM | Link to this
Is Karen Handel really a “woman?”
By say what?
January 12, 2009 9:46 AM | Link to this
What is it with the RNC, and women with nothing more than HS diploma’s and junior college credits? Most candidates have stellar education backgrounds or law school, why should we dumb down leadership roles just because she is a WOMAN. ONce again women are being exploited for a political cause, and not their own cause. It seems that GA is on every bandwagon coming except the real world wagon- our politics suck. In the next 10 years one of the parties will surely beat this gimmick by having some Woman who had to put off her hopes of a GED in order to support her spouse in his dreams of running moonshine because the bible says men are the head of the household. Doesn’t matter that his enterprise will be illegal, its just the fact that they are married heterosexuals who have a strong belief in God, and they have a business enterprise.
By say what?
January 12, 2009 9:48 AM | Link to this
What is it with the RNC, and women with nothing more than HS diploma’s and junior college credits? Most candidates have stellar education backgrounds or law school, why should we dumb down leadership roles just because she is a WOMAN. ONce again women are being exploited for a political cause, and not their own cause. It seems that GA is on every bandwagon coming except the real world wagon- our politics suck. In the next 10 years one of the parties will surely beat this gimmick by having some Woman who had to put off her hopes of a GED in order to support her spouse in his dreams of running moonshine because the bible says men are the head of the household. Doesn’t matter that his enterprise will be illegal, its just the fact that they are married heterosexuals who have a strong belief in God, and they have a business enterprise.
By say what?
January 12, 2009 9:50 AM | Link to this
What is it with the RNC, and women with nothing more than HS diploma’s and junior college credits? Most candidates have stellar education backgrounds or law school, why should we dumb down leadership roles just because she is a WOMAN. ONce again women are being exploited for a political cause, and not their own cause. It seems that GA is on every bandwagon coming except the real world wagon- our politics suck. In the next 10 years one of the parties will surely beat this gimmick by having some Woman who had to put off her hopes of a GED in order to support her spouse in his dreams of running moonshine because the bible says men are the head of the household. Doesn’t matter that his enterprise will be illegal, its just the fact that they are married heterosexuals who have a strong belief in God, and they have a business enterprise.
By Will Jones
January 12, 2009 10:16 AM | Link to this
No kids and didn’t adopt. Raising no family. Is she really a “woman?” Can she be “blessed by G-d” in some way other than that proven by the generations? Or is Mammon her god? Does she lack “natural affection?” Can someone known in the community vouch for her moral compass and integrity? Her failure to come up with a “bullet-proof” balloting system with more than a year before the election may be why Obama didn’t “carry” Georgia. Her background is corrupt (Maryland, Roman Catholic, Quayle affiliation) and her life is uncommendable, if not perverse.
Known citizens of proven integrity - Probity, speak to Atlanta and Georgia of her virtue, or accept that she is but one more cog in the treasonous, deviant Gay Old Pervert party which brought us Bush1’s and Nixon’s assassination of John and Martin; and only Supreme Court RC’s voting to cheat in a homosexual draft-dodger as president, to commit 9/11 for false war…in service to the Roman Anti-Christ.
By SoS
January 12, 2009 12:18 PM | Link to this
The Secretary of State position should be a non-partisan election. It’s too important. Take the poltics out of it. Handel made some big mistakes in the last year when she brought politics into the process. Jim Powell should sue her over what she did to him.
Both parties should agree that SoS should be non-partisan.
By nrp
January 12, 2009 6:43 PM | Link to this
I wonder if Handel’s selection of ex-Sen. Dole’s campaign manager signals the sort of tone we are likely to see from her campaign - i.e., mean and slimy. This would certainly match with Handel’s mean and hyper-partisan press releases and other behavior during the recent election season. All this is definitely NOT the sort of the thing that will make the Republican party the Party of Solutions as we look ahead into the next decade.
Cagle seems like a much more rational person who understands the give-and-take of democracy in action.
By Will Jones
January 12, 2009 6:53 PM | Link to this
Elizabeth Dole was another “non-woman,” married to a Viagra-peddling adulterer, who, pretending to be a “values/spiritual” person of integrity and character, chose to be childless while serving a provably treasonous faction. It’s the “spirit of the age” which is upon us…excorcised only by the trial and conviction for treason of Bush, Cheney and their 9/11 accomplices.
Dole’s line, like Handel’s and Reagan’s is “cut-off.” G-d has a “hand” in that. May America soon be free of the Anti-Christ. Amen.
By ClueLess
January 12, 2009 9:00 PM | Link to this
nrp, He ran Handel’s SoS campaign.
By Michael Cross
January 12, 2009 10:35 PM | Link to this
I know Karen Handel personally and have for a decade. She is quite intelligent. She is also one of the most logical and pragmatic politicians I ever have met. I can, do, and will vouch for her moral compass and integrity.
By Will Jones
January 13, 2009 11:10 AM | Link to this
Should we expect anything else from “a Republican Lawyer?”
“There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.”
“It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.”
You should brush up on President Washington’s Farewell Address, to try to understand how your looking up to Dan Quayle rather than David Letterman has brought the worst, rather than the best, of Indiana to Georgia.
Your Gay Old Pervert faction serves only corruption. Had your “Political Science” education inclined you toward wisdom rather than ambition, you’d know the faction you slavishly serve is responsible for the finance of Adolph Hitler, on behalf of your Roman Catholic Church, whose Hitlerian, anti-American, anti-woman dogma is foisted off on the American public by the craven, draft-dodging, hypocrites you support…and also killed John Kennedy and Dr. King to send us to die for the pope you serve in Rome’s slave plantation of Indochina.
How “intelligent” can Karen Handel (or Michael. D. Cross, Jr., of Alpharetta) be to vest herself in such perversion and treason? Was her decision or G-d’s that her line is cut-off?
Are you a “tail-less fox” trying to convince us of the moral supportability of Elizabeth Dole’s or Karen Handel’s decision to forego Motherhood, while pretending to be “leaders” in some way not perfectly responsible for the trainwreck The People now suffer?
Read “The New Pearl Harbor,” then try to convince us you and Handel are not witting accomplices of Bush’s and Cheney’s 9/11 treason…or vainly try to laugh it off in the arena of public discourse in the greatest hope for the recovery of true America: Atlanta GA.
theamericanfundament.blogspot.com