Women Wage Key Campaigns for Democrats

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If the Democrats have their way, the 2006 Congressional elections will be the revenge of the mommy party.
Democratic women are running major campaigns in nearly half of the two dozen most competitive House races where their party hopes to pick up enough Republican seats to regain control of the House. Democratic strategists are betting that the voters' unrest and hunger for change — reflected consistently in public opinion polls — create the perfect conditions for their party's female candidates this year.

"In an environment where people are disgusted with politics in general, who represents clean and change?" asks Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "Women." Republicans, who have prospered in recent elections by running as the guardians of national security and clearly hope to do so again, dismiss this theory. But it will ultimately be tested in places like this Philadelphia suburb, where Lois Murphy, a 43-year-old lawyer and Democratic activist, lost a Congressional campaign in 2004 by just two percentage points.

This time, as she challenges the same Republican incumbent, Representative Jim Gerlach, Ms. Murphy said in an interview in her campaign headquarters in Narberth, she senses an electorate that is "really, really" ready for change, tired of the ethics scandals, and convinced "that their government has been letting them down." On whether her sex is a particular asset this year, Ms. Murphy replied, "I leave that to the political experts, which I am not." But Ms. Murphy said that her agenda — ethics reform, fiscal responsibility, affordable health care, more sensitivity to the environment — was connecting with moderates in both political parties.

In another high-profile race, an open seat in Illinois's Sixth District in the Chicago suburbs, L. Tammy Duckworth, a former Army helicopter pilot who lost both legs in Iraq, locked up the Democratic nomination in a narrow primary victory on Tuesday — over another woman. "It's about change on so many levels," said Ms. Duckworth of her campaign, which she said would focus heavily on the need to improve and expand health care. "If being a woman underscores that, makes it clear that I'm going to be an effective agent of change, that's great."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/politics/24women.html?hp&ex=1143176400&en=769746b9dfe1c9de&ei=5094&partner=homepage