Christine Todd Whitman.
I don't know what it is with my penchant for kickass Republican women lately. Maybe it's because most of the Republicans I hear about make my skin crawl, and these women don't, and so their lack of heeby-jeeby vibes is just astonishing to me.
Anyway.
Christine Todd Whitman, former two-term governor of New Jersey, is a Republican. She used to be the GOP's "It Girl"...until the party realized that she had a conscience and supported things like same-sex marriage and reproductive rights and other similarly evil, hell-raising atrocities. Now, the GOP kind of hates her/ignores her, but she's been making some waves lately despite their priggish dislike for/fear of her.
Women's eNews (specifically, J. Trout Lowen) recently did a story covering Whitman's work on taking back the GOP for the moderates. (And, awesomely enough, mentions the conference call that WCF held with her last week, which should be up on the new website in a bit. The relevance here is that this conference call is totally what made me fall in love with her.)
See, most Republicans aren't priggish douchefaces who hate women and gays and (shh don't tell anyone, this one's on the d.l.) those awful dark-skinned devils. A lot of Republicans are socially moderate and fiscally conservative. And while I still disagree with a lot of their fiscally conservative politics, these "socially inclusive" Republicans are actually decent people who I wouldn't mind in our political environment. As it stands now, those wielding the power in the Republican party are far from decent, blatantly misogynistic assholes. And dealing with them or watching other decent people have to deal with them kind of makes me want to vomit. Projectile. Onto their ugly shoes.
Ahem. Moving on.
Back to Christie.
She started this PAC, It's My Party Too, or IMP-PAC (and, btw, also wrote a book by the same name, which is one of the first books on my reading list this summer). Said PAC supports non-crazy extremist Republican candidates, since these candidates are the ones that are so often pushed out of the race due to lack of funding. The Republican "base" isn't all crazy fundies, and she's trying to get the moderates and centrists to actually grow some metaphorical balls and not let the extremists take the party somewhere frightening. There are already about 25 chapters of IMP-PAC in different states, and the PAC is rather new, so that's great progress for her and, therefore, for the Republican party. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not a Republican, nor will I ever be, but I do like it when the good kind of Republican tries to move her party back to a more decent, less hateful place.
And thus, I'm slightly in love with Christine Todd Whitman.
(Ok, so she's not perfect, and her actions as the head of the EPA leave a bit to be desired. But hey. It's all about bipartisan cooperation on important issues. Specifically with this, important issues like reproductive rights. You're never going to like every single elected official or follow them on every issue. And since there are going to be Republicans in office who have to work with my (New York, so they're almost bound to be Democratic) elected officials on a federal level, I'd prefer to have people (women, specifically) like Christine Todd Whitman sitting in those Congressional seats, people who will at least protect basic human and civil rights.
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