In the 1996 presidential election (Republican Senator Bob Dole v. incumbent Democrat William Jefferson Clinton), Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted that Clinton and his team were successfully targeting a specific group of voters and that this strategy probably would gain President Clinton a second term. The term can be traced as far back as 1982 but it truly came of age in 1996, called by some "the year of the soccer mom."
Who the term refers to barely has to be described: moms, mostly middle or upper middle class, with children, harried, working at least part time outside of the house and politically pragmatic in all things. This profile suited the direction of Clintonian politics that, after a rough first term, had been forced to the middle or even a bit right by Newt Gingrich and his "Contract with America." One forgets, in fact, how fast moving that Gingrich juggernaut was -- amplified by a still relatively new figure named Rush Limbaugh. Only, perhaps, the Oklahoma bombing by Timothy McVeigh (associated with the Michigan Militia) lessened the speed of this rightward trend.
Clinton was looking for a pragmatic center to hang on to as the "right" v. "left" wars we live with today broke apart years of tradition of public dialogue between opposing groups. He found that pragmatic center in Soccer Moms, perhaps the last "political" group that truly understood what it meant to put others -- and family -- first.
During a recent local election I thought about those 1990s soccer moms and the legacy they left. http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/02/how-soccer-moms-have-moved-on/When things get difficult, the country now turns -- and should turn -- to women. They alone seemed to retained the capacity to listen while they speak, to look for solutions and common ground, not things to fight about.
So -- on mother's day -- hats off to soccer moms.
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