The Republican War against Women: An Insider’s Report from behind the Lines, by Tanya Melich (Bantam, 356 pp., $23.95)
AS A preschooler in Utah, Tanya Melich handed out Willkie for President pamphlets, but she has now abandoned her “birthright Republicanism” owing to the influence of misogynist newcomers who have captured her GOP in their quest for a “theocracy.” Outside forces opposed to women’s equality (the Catholic Church in particular) have forced her party to create “a new partnership of racism and sexism in pursuit of Republican victory.” This tiresome screed is written with the anger of a feminist scorned. And scorned this ex-Rockefeller campaign aide repeatedly was, at convention after convention, both by the uncouth newcomers (Who are these people and why can’t they wipe their feet?) and by her male pro-choice allies, like Chuck Percy, Pete Wilson, and Bill Weld, who invariably left her and her feminist friends “hung out to dry.” That nobody likes a sore loser is just one of the lessons Tanya Melich fails to grasp as she whines through this paranoid account of the cultural forces at play in the GOP. —Kate O’Beirne
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