A pivotal moment for #MeToo
Kavanaugh hearing is latest rallying cry for women. Next stop: Midterm elections.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — As the tension and emotion of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony and Brett Kavanaugh’s defense settled in Friday, one thing was clear: For legions of women who were glued to the radio or television, the hearing was more than political. It was personal.
“As a female, if you are semi-socially active and have a group of friends and you’ve never heard of sexual abuse of your friends, I have to wonder where you’re coming from,” said Phyllis Moore, a retired nurse practitioner.
With Republican Senate Judiciary Committee members advancing Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate even as they said they found Ford credible, the hearing became a painful rebuke of the #MeToo movement for some women and a reminder for many that the gender war is far from over.
“I feel stressed, jumpy, tired, angry and desperate for justice. How many waves of #MeToo will it take?” said Seo-Young Chu, who last year accused a now-deceased Stanford professor of sexually assaulting her when she was a student.
Cynera Dodati, a 22-year-old biomedical engineering graduate student at San Jose State, said she could identify with Ford’s experiences. “It was really painful to watch,” she said.
And Samantha Corbin, a California lobbyist who last year co-founded the We Said Enough Movement in Sacramento to shine a light on sexual harassment and assault in politics, also described a visceral reaction to the hearing. “I was torn between tears and, frankly, blind rage,” she said.
Political experts say the hearing could have a profound effect on the upcoming midterm elections, potentially unleashing another Year of the Woman, nearly 27 years after Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Thomas won his Senate vote, but a record number of women, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., were elected to Congress in 1992 after his confirmation. Already this year, a record number of women — 200 — are running for House seats.
How women react will depend largely on the final outcome of the confirmation process, some strategists and experts say.
“The only thing that could drive a larger female voter turnout than the Kavanaugh hearing is a Kavanaugh confirmation,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican strategist who is now a lecturer in the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication.
Kevin Eckery, a Republican strategist in Sacramento, said that he doubted the hearing would change the minds of many midterm voters but agreed it could increase turnout and enthusiasm among educated, suburban women who oppose Trump.
Ford’s testimony “was riveting and raw and touched a nerve for a lot of people,” Eckery said. Between the allmale GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the angry comments from some of the senators, “the optics still were pretty bad” for the party, he said. “It was authentic and unusually real for something taking place in the Capitol building.”
For Jacquie Heffner, a member of the Santa Clara County Democratic Party’s central committee, watching the hearing was horrific.
“Any woman who has experienced any kind of trauma like that can tell you that there are things that you remember and other things that you don’t remember,” she said, pausing as her voice began to crack. “It’s hard to talk about things that hit so close to home.”
Heffner, 59, attended Catholic schools in San Francisco in the 1970s. In that day, she said, women didn’t speak up. Today, she said, “They don’t take it like I took it, like a lot of women my age took things.” While Heffner hopes that today’s women who saw all the male senators at the hearing become inspired to get involved in politics and vote, she worries that the lesson is the same: “Women yet again are learning it’s he said, she said” — and that the guy usually wins.
In competitive congressional races in California, Democrats hope that the furor over the hearing helps turn out women voters who want to send the Trump administration a message.
“Every college-educated woman knows exactly what happened to Christine Ford,” said Katie Merrill, a strategist with the Democratic PAC Fight Back California. “Every college-educated woman knows she’s telling the truth, knows guys like Brett Kavanaugh, has experienced that bad behavior anytime they went to a party on campus.”
Merrill said, “This is a pivotal moment in our cultural history where we now as a nation need to face the fact that women need to be respected and heard.”
“THE ONLY THING THAT COULD DRIVE A LARGER FEMALE VOTER TURNOUT THAN THE KAVANAUGH HEARING IS A KAVANAUGH CONFIRMATION. DAN SCHNUR LECTURER IN THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA’S ANNENBERG SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AND FORMER REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST
But Ray McNally, a Republican strategist in Sacramento, argued that the hearing was likely to “fire up Republicans as well,” with Kavanaugh’s incendiary defense inspiring his supporters.
“Party loyalty is the highest I’ve ever seen it, and I’ve been doing this for 40 years,” McNally said. Republican and Democratic voters — both men and women — tend to stick with their party’s candidates, he said. “This is going to inspire women to turn out to vote, but they don’t vote as a monolith.”
State Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, a moderate Republican from the East Bay, said she feels it would be a disservice to sexual assault victims to turn the handling of such complaints into a partisan political issue. “By putting this just into electoral politics, I think it belittles not only what Ford was testifying to but what we should be working on as a community and as a nation,” she said Friday.
Baker was relatively new to the workforce during the Thomas hearing. But she said she wants her daughter, now a teenager, to see that the country can handle the current situation better than it did 27 years ago.
Democrat Katie Hill, who’s running in a competitive Los Angeles County congressional election, watched Thursday’s hearing with her staff. She said Ford spoke about her own experience, “but for so many women, her words represented our own silenced stories.”
“This issue is not partisan — assault and harassment do not just happen along party or gender lines,” Hill said.
While some Democrats hope the anger generated by the proceedings will drive women to become more politically active, some say Kavanaugh’s confirmation could have the opposite effect.
If Kavanaugh is confirmed, said Loyola Law professor Jessica Levinson, “I think it would be entirely understandable for women across the aisle to feel dispirited. I could see how this could turn people off: ‘I’ve been fighting for two years and I’ve been fighting and I’ve been protesting, but it doesn’t look like it’s made any difference.’”