Michele Bachmann is not the female Republican leader we need

Years ago, when I was cutting my teeth on politics in Des Moines in the late 1970s, I had the opportunity to work with one of the great Republican voices of our time, Mary Louise Smith. She was the first female chair of the Republican National Committee and led the party through the mess that followed Watergate.

Mary Louise was a class act who was a civil rights activist and a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. At the time, she was a part of a group of leading Republican women – fiscally conservative (by the standards of the time) but socially progressive. They worked across party lines on issues from child care to reproductive choice, and they worked on both a national scale and within their own states.

One day in the early 1980s, I pulled Mary Louise aside and asked her (as I often did) why she was a Republican when our values and issues were so aligned. She usually just chuckled, but this time she answered: “If you knew what was happening in our party, you’d be on your knees thanking me for being a Republican.”

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