Word: hecklers
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Toeing the Reagan line and keeping up appearances as a feminist would seem to be mutually exclusive tasks for mere mortal women. Nevertheless. Heckler has been trying since 1979, hop-scotching on issues like the Squeal Rule, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and the effects of Reagan's budget cuts on women, and doing what political writer Charles Pierce of the Boston Phoenix calls "the abortion tapdance." According to Joshua Resnek, her former campaign press secretary. Margaret Heckler put Pierce at the top of her list of reporters not to be talked to--right after Chris Black, the Boston Globe...
...abortion tapdance consists of a lot of passionate rhetoric and a voting record that doesn't match. Heckler has been a staunch right-to-lifer since the year one, so much so that Sen. Bob Packwood (R.-Ore) became one of the only three senators to vote against Heckler during her confirmation hearings for her new federal post. When Packwood, who supports abortion, asked her at the hearings whether she believed Congress ought to use legislation to reverse the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing it. Heckler engaged in some top-notch hedging. "The reason I am so bothered." Packwood said...
...THEN, as a congresswoman, did she vote for no less than six packages which included federal funding for abortion? Robert McCarthy asked that question during his unsuccessful Congressional campaign against Heckler in 1980. Heckler had never dreamed those funding votes would come back to besmirch her pro-life image. "McCarthy forced Heckler in a role," Pierce says, "where people would look at her and say she's at best a wimp and at worst a liar" Pierce calls McCarthy "the great untold story of the Margaret Heckler Barney Frank race." By forcing Heckler to defend both sides of the fence...
Other troubles had begun to brew for Heckler back in the McCarthy campaign. In 1980 the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus, of which Heckler had been a founding member, threw its support behind McCarthy. In fact, none of the major women's organizations backed Heckler--a bit of a blow to a woman who always tried to present herself as a feminist standard bearer. Resnek says of his experience during the 1982 campaign. "There I was trying to sensitize myself to women's issues, working for a real live woman boss, and women hated...
...Mass. Women's Political Caucus dumped Heckler for a variety of reasons. The proverbial straw, though, was probably Heckler's performance at the 1980 GOP convention. At a news conference in the Capital before the convention, Heckler, a member of the Platform Committee, told reporters that she would back an endorsement of the ERA, and would attempt to bring the issue to the floor if it lost in committee. What exactly happened at the convention is not clear, but it is clear that, for the first time since the 1940s, the GOP 1980 platform did not include an endorsement...