No more angry feminists.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Democrat women reluctantly endorse Pres. Bill Clinton - Crashing the Parties - Cover Story

Culturally, anyway, if not always on a policy level, the Democrats are a far more appealing crowd than the Republicans--more racially diverse, more populist in their rhetoric, more open to a wide range of people, and certainly a lot more attuned to women's issues, from reproductive rights to the struggles of single mothers.

While the Dole campaign does its peculiar dance to attract women and close the gender gap, the Clinton campaign can take it easy. Women are so inclined to vote Democratic that a Republican drive to get out the women's vote may actually redound to the Democrats' advantage. The National Federation of Republican Women is asking each of its 115,000 members to try to bring in ten new women to vote Republican, and the group is planning an election-day voting drive. But Democrats calculate that it was the women voters who stayed home in 1994 who gave the Republicans their victories in Congress. "If they vote this time, it will be overwhelmingly Democratic," said Tammy Baldwin, a Democratic assembly-woman from Wisconsin who came to the convention in Chicago.

Baldwin, who is an openly lesbian state official, is not thrilled with all of Clinton's policy decisions, but she is pleased with the Administration's openness, especially to gays and lesbians.

"We never had access to a White House before in the entire history of the United States," says Baldwin. "No one would even let us in the door. Yes, he screwed up royally on a couple of issues that matter a lot, but there is this feeling that we can go to the White House and talk about it. . . . That access, and the symbolism of a President who can say the words `gay' and `lesbian,' is extremely important."

Despite this feeling of inclusion, which a lot of feminists and other leftwingers share, many progressive women in the Democratic Party were having an agonizing time at the convention. For all the "celebrate-diversity" rhetoric and the happy-family atmosphere on the convention floor, for all the delegates waving rainbow flags and holding up union signs, the Clinton Administration's record of turning away from progressive goals and compromising with a rightwing Congress makes it hard to feel good about falling into line.

More than any other compromise of his Administration, Clinton's act of signing the bill that abolishes the federal entitlement to welfare just before the convention presented progressives with a moment of truth: At what point do we decide that it isn't worth...