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As a war President, one of Bush's challenges has been to remind voters of what Laura Bush calls her husband's softer side. That has been adviser Karen Hughes' assignment--to fold in the egg whites, make sure he talks about flex time and the "ownership society." The Bush campaign has a special W Stands for Women division (you can buy the pink baseball caps on its website) that is dedicated to showcasing for women the merits of the No Child Left Behind law, praising the Administration's work against the global sex-slave trade and highlighting the increase in women's health funding at the National Institutes of Health. Late last year Bush began doing more town-hall-style events in his shirtsleeves to create an atmosphere of intimacy. He likes to talk about how he has surrounded himself with strong women and, he says, appointed more of them to positions of real power than any of his predecessors.
Laura Bush, who is more popular than her husband and better liked than Kerry's wife Teresa, can hardly be called the campaign's secret weapon anymore, since she's about as visible as any First Lady could be. When she visits a small electrical-supply company run by a married couple in Albuquerque, N.M., she sells the Bush agenda for all the ways it helps women specifically. The President's push for tort reform? Good for businesses owned by women. The war on terrorism? It makes families safer. Medical-savings accounts? "Women can take these accounts with them if they start a new job or if they leave work to go home and raise a family," says the First Lady. "This is health care that we own, we manage and we can keep."
For all the compassion in the conservatism, however, the campaign is not above playing on women's fears. "I can't imagine the great agony of a mom or a dad having to make the decision about which child to pick up first on September the 11th," says the President in a campaign advertisement. The ad is designed to show that Bush is empathetic but also to remind women that dangers can break into their daily routine. The Beslan school massacre was a stark reminder of that. Both campaigns realize the atrocity shook women to the core. At the White House on Sept. 24, Bush met with children from the local John Quincy Adams Elementary School who had helped organize a toy and school-supply drive for the children of Beslan. Even Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill has cited Beslan as a reason for Bush's resurgence. In a speech in Philadelphia, Kerry declared that "no American mother should have to lie awake at night wondering whether her children will be safe at school."
Given such raw nerves and the mounting bad news from Iraq, Kerry has wrestled for weeks about how much to balance his message between foreign matters and domestic ones. A recent TIME poll found that women trusted Bush more to fight terrorism by 10 percentage points, while they favored Kerry on the economy by 4. The key, Kerry aides say, is not to prove the Senator is better than Bush on defense but to prove he's capable. "Bush is always going to win the comparison," says a Kerry staff member. "He is the Commander in Chief. For us, this is not a comparison. It's a threshold issue."