Kitchen Table Politics by Stacie Taranto

Author:Stacie Taranto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Message

Federal funding enabled McCormack to garner votes to try to steer Democrats and other lawmakers away from feminist goals and toward an HLA. As Richard Nixon and George Wallace had done in the presidential arena, McCormack used populist rhetoric to identify with the so-called silent majority of disaffected Americans that included other Democrats upset with the party’s embrace of legal abortion and other feminist goals. On the stump and in federally financed campaign commercials, she again projected gendered populism to target other white, middle-class, suburban, religious homemakers. She often equated legal abortion with other feminist-backed proposals, such as government-subsidized daycare, all of which she said threatened the traditional nuclear family and the women’s roles as wives and mothers within it. To bolster her case, McCormack appealed to raw feelings of exclusion, discomfort with rapid change, the desire to retain existent privileges in a tenuous economic environment, and patriotic sentiments about equal rights (in this case, for unborn fetuses). As one of PLAC’s printed advertisements summarized: “Behind the front page [headlines] of the libbers and the liberals…. Millions like you … make the country go, day in and day out. We know you’re there and we know you believe in the traditional values, as Ellen does.”80

McCormack reached voters by going to seventeen of the twenty states she competed in. She traveled without pretense on commercial airlines and in the car with other PLAC officers. Children sometimes came along, which illustrated PLAC’s message: the women were not typical political insiders; they were mothers compelled to save “babies.” McCormack’s appearances, though unprofessional when compared to her competitors, were impressively coordinated for a campaign consisting entirely of volunteers. The Long Island group relied on key leaders in twenty states to organize fundraising, recruit volunteers, generate press coverage, and plan campaign events. Whenever possible, McCormack seized upon outside speaking engagements to minimize planning and costs. McCormack’s one campaign stop in Indiana, for instance, was a speech that she gave at the Indiana Right to Life Convention. She spoke at similar gatherings elsewhere, including anti-abortion activist Nellie Gray’s annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., in January of 1976, which an estimated 65,000 people attended.81

Large forums like this helped McCormack reach a wide audience, but PLAC’s anti-abortion commercials did so far more effectively. Federal funding enabled PLAC to afford expensive airtime during popular, family-oriented television programs, such as Name That Tune and Treasure Hunt, which were sure to attract likeminded women. Other major ad buys were determined by the FCC’s equal time law. PLAC once purchased a five-minute block during the half-time of an NBA basketball game after one competitor, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, had done the same.82 Excoriating the supposedly pro-abortion media, one supporter in Colorado remarked that McCormack had to purchase as much national time as she could “to get only a small fraction of the exposure some of the other candidates get for free under the guise of news coverage.”83 By April of 1976, the commercials had reached an estimated forty

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