Coakley & Malcolm: America Needs a More Representative Democracy

During our interview yesterday, Coakley pointed to Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s rejoinder to Sen Jon Kyl this week (see video) as an example of the value that women’s perspective can bring to the Senate.   She said

I’m going to be a Senator for everybody, but we’re talking about a representative democracy here and some of those [women's] issues haven’t gotten a voice for funding, for legislation, that they should have.  I’m looking forward to [doing] that.

Emily’s List founder Ellen Malcolm related:

I’ve been talking today about Barbara Mikulski, who ran in 1986 and was the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right. You know, it’s kind of unbelievable. There have been 1,931 people who have served in the senate and only fourteen have been democratic women who have been elected in their own right.

So, as you can see, there are a lot of people out there that say “there’s something wrong with a representative democracy if 17% of Congress is women and the rest of it is men. Like, who are the people there that know what it’s like to take the kids to school and meet with the teachers, and take care of their parents as they get older?”

We would have a better Congress, maybe a less partisan Congress, if we had more women in office. So there are a lot of people around the country that belong to Emily’s List that say, when they hear of a good candidate like Martha, “You Go Girl. We want to make a difference for that.”