With a primary less than a week away and the sting of a lost presidential election still fresh in their minds, the Fairfax County Democratic Committee kicked off the 2005 election season with a luncheon June 8that was part fund-raiser — part networking opportunity and all love-fest.
"This is the third annual Women Celebrating Women luncheon," said Andrea Perr, chair of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee's Women's Rights Committee, responsible for organizing the event.
"This is an interesting year for politics," she said. "We have primaries coming up so we're not sure who we're going to be supporting in all districts yet. Once we know how much profit we've cleared from this event and others, we'll know how much we can dole out to our candidates."
The fund-raiser began in 2002 out of a special election in the House of Delegates in which two women were running for office.
"Men have historically gotten elected to office and therefore received the power of incumbency," Perr said. "They have access to money, lobby groups, the media, and they generally have more name recognition. That's the reason we're doing this, we're trying to level the playing field."
To say that women are not able to get elected on their own standings is not exactly fair or true, she said. Neither is it correct to say that women are better politicians than men.
"Women run for office for different reasons. We feel it's better to have both sides represented to get a better understanding of issues and provide both voices to the discussion," she said.
As a candidate for lieutenant governor, Leslie Byrne got her political start within her home community.
"I started in the PTA, the League of Women Voters and other civic offices," she said. "I ran for the House of Delegates in 1985 and was the first woman elected."
She was also named national consumer advocate by then-president Bill Clinton and later served in the Virginia Senate.
As one of two women running for the chance to be elected lieutenant governor, Byrne said events like Wednesday's luncheon are important to keep the party's momentum going.
"We've been stagnant the last few years. The number of women in the Virginia legislature has stayed the same," she said.
Women have always supported the Democratic party, Byrne said, calling them the party's "base."
"This gives us a chance to get more involved and inspired" to continue work in the political realm, she said of the luncheon.
When a woman decides to run for office, her motivation usually comes from her neighborhood, her community, she said.
"Someone told me once that women get involved in politics to do something and men get involved in politics to become somebody," she said. "So much of our involvement is for and from our communities, we're looking to make them better. Women really do have a different view for why they decided to run."
As one of the handful of men at the luncheon, newly-announced delegate candidate Chuck Caputo, who will be running against either Chris Craddock or Gary Reese for the 67th District, applauded the "outstanding women" who currently serve in the Virginia legislature.
"We have two women running for lieutenant governor, two running for the House of Delegates. It's wonderful," he said.
Through his years of elected service, Caputo has worked side-by-side with women on the board of trustees for the Northern Virginia Community College and the Fairfax County School Board.
"The plus we have in the Democratic party is that we have so many women involved in politics," he said. "Women's rights are very important."
WHEN ASKED if he would support his own wife should she ever decided to become politically involved, he laughed. "This would've been a great seat for her to run for," he said. "Of course I'd support her. She's been supporting me for 40 years. We're a good team."
"When Virginia Democrats talk about having diversity in the party, it's not just rhetoric," said Lindsey Renolds, executive director of the Democratic Party of Virginia. "We have eight women in the House of Delegates, seven in the Senate. We expect these numbers to grow."
Women are running for nine of the 10 seats up for election in the House of Delegates, she said.
During last year's presidential election, Fairfax County voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic party, she said. "Fairfax County is an incubator for political leaders in the future."
Growing up in Texas, Cecile Richards, the evening's keynote speaker, said her grandmother would tell her how the only people who couldn't vote when her grandmother was a girl were "idiots, criminals, the insane and women."
"It was especially gratifying when, a generation later, my mother was elected governor of Texas," Richards said of her mother, Anne Richards.
What helped Democrats the most in the last election was the return of grassroots tactics, she said.
"I never thought I'd live to see the day when old-fashioned, knocking-on-the-doors, neighbor-to-neighbor politics would come back, but I'm so glad it has," Richards said.
Through groups like America Votes, of which she is the president, and others, political organizations teamed up to pool their resources and contacts in order to make a larger, broader-reaching impact, she said.
One demographic that played an important role in the 2004 election was women of all ages and status.
"Single women are the group most likely to support progressive candidates, but they don't necessarily have the time to vote," Richards said. "They not only have little time for politics, they have little faith that politics are going to advance their plight in any way."
However, the bigger problem facing the Democratic party is the need to step up and declare priorities and beliefs.
"We are never going to get elected in this country if people don't know what we believe in," she said, receiving an enthusiastic round of applause.
She also provided a five-point task list for her party for the upcoming election, ways they can better convey their message.
"First, we need to debunk the right-shift myth from the last election," she said, meaning the Republican party's focus on morals and values having won the election for President George W. Bush. "We need to recognize the power of our grassroots organizations. We need to commit ourselves to working with young people. They have ideas we've never thought of and energy we don't have."
She also urged those in the room to realize that "change isn't coming out of Washington. The only way we're going to make things change is state by state."
But the most important thing to do, Richards said, is to "engage our base early and often." Women are a large part of the Democratic party, she said, and need to be remembered "more than two weeks before the election, when the party always seems to 'discover' women and gear their campaigns to them."