Women push to the fore in US primaries

ONCE, California Democrats led the way to a year of the women. Now, nearly two decades later, Republicans hope that it’s their turn.

Former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman has won the party’s nomination for California governor, while ex-Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina will compete for a seat on the Senate, a pair of wealthy businesswomen and first-timers up against veteran politicians.

In next-door Nevada, a third woman contender, Sharron Angle, won the right to oppose Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the autumn.

Hundreds of miles to the east, South Carolina state Republican Nikki Haley outpaced three male rivals in a race for her party’s nomination for governor. Shy of a majority, she will face Gresham Barrett in a June 22 runoff in a solidly Republican state.

Democrats, too, got into the theme of the busiest primary night of the year.

Embattled two-term Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln scored a narrow win over her labour-backed rival in Arkansas, and now must pivot to face Republican John Boozman in autumn.

The primaries, spread across a dozen states from coast to coast, took place against a backdrop of the worst recession in decades, stubbornly high unemployment, dispiriting daily images of the damage caused by an offshore oil rig disaster and poll after poll that reported the voters angry and eager for a change.

Lincoln told voters she understood their discontent with a late campaign ad that said: “I know you’re angry at Washington.”

Whitman offered her own version of the same sentiment in her first appearance as GOP (“grand old party”) nominee to replace retiring Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“Career politicians in Sacramento and Washington be warned: You now face your worst nightmare – two businesswomen from the real world who know how to create jobs, balance budgets and get things done,” she said.

The remarks were aimed at Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer and former Governor Edmund G Brown Jr, seeking a return to the office he left in 1983.

Ironically, Boxer’s victory and that of fellow California Senator Dianne Feinstein in 1992 were standout events in an election year that sent record numbers of women to Congress, many of them Democrats. Many women were enraged by the predominantly male Senate’s treatment of Anita Hill during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; that anger translated into female candidates running for Congress.

Whitman spent more than $70 million (€58.3m) in her own funds to claim her nomination.

As bruising as she and Fiorina were, the night’s events merely set the stage for the autumn campaign, when Republicans hope to challenge Democratic control of Congress and the two parties vie for three dozen statehouses.

Fiorina is “against a woman’s right to choose, supports the Arizona immigration law, wants to repeal healthcare and supports allowing people on the ‘no-fly’ list to buy guns”, said Sen Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Michael Steele, the Republican national chairman, countered that in victory, Lincoln “has made it clear that she will simply fall in line with President Obama’s big-spending, big-government agenda, putting her vastly out of touch with the majority of Arkansans”.

Another conservative Democrat, California representative Jane Harman, withstood a challenge from a more liberal opponent – in this case, Marcy Winograd, co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Progressive Democrats of America.

Two incumbents did not fare as well on Tuesday.

Republican Governor Jim Gibbons of Nevada fell to Brian Sandoval, a former federal judge, after a term marked by a messy public divorce and allegations of infidelity. Rory Reid, the son of the Senate majority leader, won the Democratic nomination.

And Republican representative Bob Inglis of South Carolina trailed challenger Trey Gowdy by double digits, though he qualified for a runoff on June 22 in the solidly conservative district. The challenger campaigned as an opponent of the 2008 financial bailout legislation that the incumbent supported. Gibbons was the first governor tossed from office in a year of living dangerously for incumbents throughout the States.