Las Vegas Review-Journal - Thomas Mitchell

Talk about gaps.

At the risk of being labeled something or the other by the politically correct crowd, I’ve noticed over the years a stark resemblance between gender and politics. Maybe it has something to do with that head vs. heart way of decisionmaking.

Exhibit A: Today’s poll results that we commissioned from pollster Brad Coker at Mason-Dixon Polling & Research.

Some people looked at the numbers and saw how Sen. John Ensign’s peccadillo hurt him in the eyes of the voters when compared to a poll taken in May. Others noticed, even after his confession to having an affair with a campaign staffer, his favorables were still higher than those of Sen. Harry Reid and Gov. Jim Gibbons.

I noticed there is a huge chasm between the attitudes of men and women in way that matches the differences between Republicans and Democrats.

To begin with, before we even get to the Ensign affair questions, look at the job performance ratings for President Barack Obama.

____________________Men      Women        Dem      Rep
EXCELLENT                     19%         31%               48%       3%
POOR                              29%         21%                 5%     48%

Women and Democrats lean similarly, though not in lock step.

But let’s get down to the questions that you might think have a built-in gender bias. Asked if the affair had changed their opinion of Ensign:

__________________Men      Women         Dem      Rep
LIKE LESS                  27%     37%                 37%     27%
NO CHANGE               54%     38%                 30%     67%

Asked about whether the staffer’s salary was doubled during the affair was a serious matter, again the gender-party similarities showed up:

___________________Men      Women          Dem      Rep
VERY SERIOUS            24%     40%                 45%     20%

Asked whether Ensign should resign, the results again were significant:

____________________Men      Women         Dem      Rep
SHOULD                         25%     33%                40%     17%
SHOULD NOT                  68%     56%                45%     79%

Maybe there are just more women Democrats, but perhaps that itself says something.

When Larry Summers, now a top economic adviser to Obama, was forced to resign from as president of Harvard it was because he offered as one of three possibilities as to why there were fewer women in the higher ranks of academic science and engineering that there was “different availability of aptitude at the high end.”

Never mind whether he had a point and no one could prove him wrong or had even attempted to do so. He had to go. He had violated the PC gospel that women and men are equal, period. End of story.

Maybe we’re equal but wired differently?