MR. KOJO NNAMDIThe death of Osama bin Laden will certainly reverberate into the 2012 election. And the next head of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a representative from Florida, will help steer the Democratic Party through that election. That the pick of a woman is -- that the pick is a woman has many feminists cheering and speculating. There are some prominent women making headlines in politics today, from vocal Tea Partiers like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Yet women have often been given less credibility and few opportunities to prove themselves on issues of national security.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIAnd 25 years after Geraldine Ferraro ran as the vice presidential candidate, no woman has attained the office of commander in chief. While the number of women in Congress has almost quadrupled over that time from 24 to 88, women still hold just 16 percent of those seats. Joining us to discuss how women figure into the 2012 election is Barbara Perry, senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. She joins us from studios at the University of Virginia. Barbara Perry, thank you for joining us.

MS. BARBARA PERRYGreat to be with you, Kojo.

NNAMDIAnd in our Washington studios, Christina Bellantoni, associate politics editor of CQ Roll Call. Christina, good to see you again.

MS. CHRISTINA BELLANTONIGood afternoon.

NNAMDII couldn't help noticing and observing last night that President Obama said thanks to the men who carried out this operation. And even though the boots on the ground were conceivably men, there were presumably women in the intelligence pipeline that led to this. The conventional wisdom about women in politics is that they're not strong on national security issues. What's up with that?

BELLANTONI(laugh) Well, tell that to Hillary Clinton. I mean, obviously, we saw a lot of this play out in 2007 and 2008 during Democratic presidential primary between Barack Obama and Clinton. Obviously, she's now a key member of his team, even though we know she's not going to stay should he win a second term. But the area of a woman needing to assert herself on, not just being tough, sort of, with her employees or her officials that run her campaign or whatever have you, it's very important that a woman be able to demonstrate that she can be tough on national security.

BELLANTONIAnd you saw Hillary Clinton come out with that immediately. She called Barack Obama basically a wimp during that campaign. Well, he's sort of proven that wrong. And, obviously, they're all working on the same team now.

NNAMDIYour take on the same issue, Barbara Perry?

PERRYWell, I'm at -- as we speak, I'm looking at a chart that -- now, granted this is from 2000, so it's about a decade old, but when a survey was taken that asked people, when it comes to foreign policy, which type of American president would you expect to do a better job, a man or a woman, on foreign policy, 15 percent said women, 45 percent said men. Now, 36 percent said no difference, so that's the good news.

NNAMDIThe military is considered the hardest of the branches of our government. And since women have limited roles in combat, there are fewer chances for real advancement. Do you think on -- well, I guess I should ask, how do you think that affects the perception of women's abilities in this realm, Barbara?

PERRYThis is a problem, of course, that women in the military have pointed for years, first with legal impediments to their -- to participating in combat, which is usually the stepping-stone to leadership positions in the military. I think that what will have happened over these 10 years of two wars will be that women, in practice, have been closer to combat and, in fact, in combat, and therefore, they will have these stepping-stones to leadership that they perhaps have not happened in the past. But I think we still are not beyond this two-track system to leadership in the military.

NNAMDIChristina, in Hillary Clinton's function as secretary of state, do you think that she has, on this issue of national security -- even though that is not technically the area of the secretary of state, they do overlap. And do you think that in her role as secretary of state, she has shown that women can lead on these issues?

BELLANTONIAbsolutely. She's been -- the White House has been pretty open and honest about her role in so many of these key foreign policy decisions the president has made, from sending more troops to Afghanistan to withdrawing troops from Iraq. And she has been at that table in the Situation Room, able to communicate her strong preferences in some cases, disagreeing with the president in several cases, and then also taking that abroad and taking the president's message out there. So she has definitely, you know, shattered barriers in that way.

BELLANTONIBut it is striking, I think, that you look at all the players that were sort of mentioned about being in the Situation Room, and as you mentioned, in this actual operation that lasted, you know, 40-minute firefight, you know, it was definitely men, and that's who's getting the credit. You know, you're talking about the Navy SEALs, I mean, that's a male-dominated group there, and I think that you are going to hear a lot about those men and what they achieved.

NNAMDILet's talk about the role of women in politics in general. And in case you'd like to join the conversation, you can call us at 800-433-8850. Do you think women are not taking this seriously as they should be on issues of national security? 800-433-8850. Barbara Perry, there are some high-profile elected women making headlines, but, in fact, the number of women actually holding office in Congress and state legislatures actually slipped this past election. Why do you think that is?

PERRYIt did, indeed. I suspect it could be a host of reasons, but one might actually be the economy. And that is that typically people who go into politics are those who have the kinds of flexibility in their lives, usually their careers allow them, oftentimes it's businesspeople or people on the law who have access to funding, who have access to colleagues they can call upon, friends they can call upon, to work in campaigns. And if two -- people with two breadwinners in a family are struggling, maybe one has lost a job, I just think the economy could have been a major factor in keeping women out of these races or perhaps not allowing them to garner as much money as they would have needed to succeed in winning office.

NNAMDIChristina.

BELLANTONIWell, it's also true that more Democrats tend to be women, and so many Democrats lost in this last election that that's why you saw their numbers depleted. But you also have -- you'll hear Democratic groups talk about this a little bit. It's a redistricting year, which opens up new seats and new opportunities in a lot of states. You know, some states are losing ground and losing seats in Congress, but particularly in the West, you're seeing in Nevada, New Mexico, there are several strong female candidates that women's groups think this will provide a new opportunity for women to serve in government.

NNAMDIThe next head of the Democratic National Committee is going to be a woman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Christina, talk a little bit about her. A, what is her job? What is the role of the head of the Democratic National Committee? And what do Democrats see as the strengths of Debbie Wasserman Schultz?

BELLANTONIShe's a Democrat from Florida, and she's long been considered a rising star in the party. I know that phrase is overused, but it's accurate in her case. She's sort of a go-getter, do-it-all. She was one of the top fundraisers for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which handles House elections, but she also was a top surrogate -- we talked a little bit about the primary earlier. What's very interesting about her, she was a strong Hillary Clinton supporter in 2007 and 2008.

BELLANTONIShe was very vocal, speaking out against President Obama -- Barack Obama, then the candidate. But when the primary was over, she joined his team, and he trusts her so much he's now appointed her to be the head of DNC, where she will be in charge making very crucial decisions about where money and actual physical resources of staff go for the presidential election and for all of these congressional elections just next year, but also raising money. This is a huge, huge task. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine stepped aside so he could run for Senate in Virginia, and she's now gonna be tasked with figuring out the most competitive states, getting as much money as possible, and helping Democrats win that election.

NNAMDIBarbara Perry, you have heard Debbie Wasserman speak. What do you think she brings to the job?

PERRYWell, all of the elements that Christina just mentioned and plus a few more. I think the fact that she was out so quickly after her friend, Congressman Gabby Giffords, was shot down in January. And people might remember seeing Congressman Wasserman Schultz talking about her dear friend and how when she went to visit her in the hospital, and they said, well, what did you talk to her about? And she said the things that ladies talk about. We talked about children and we talked about getting Gabby back into Congress.

PERRYAnd so I think she has this amazing ability to relate to people on so many different levels, in particular as well, her own battle with cancer that -- from which she suffered through. I think it was nine surgeries and very difficult painful times and yet hardly ever missed a day at work in Congress.

BELLANTONIAnd didn't want people to know about having cancer...

PERRYIndeed. She did.

BELLANTONI...and she kept it very private and only her closest friends knew it.

NNAMDI800-433-8850 is the number to call. If you'd like to join the conversation, we're talking about women in politics. What do you think of the Democrat's pick for the next head of the party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz? 800-433-8850 or you can go to our website kojoshow.org, join the conversation there. Barbara Perry, are there advantages to being a woman in tough political fight? And if so, what are they and what would the disadvantages be?

PERRYWell, we'll start with the disadvantages because they've been there so much longer.

NNAMDIYes.

PERRYStereotypes about women and the fact that they deal with soft issues, such as family and health care, but perhaps aren't as good on the foreign policy or the military front. And the -- what many women say -- and I'm sure Hillary Clinton would agree with this -- that as one person has put it, when women run for office, the topic of conversation in the media would be thusly -- hair, husbands and hemlines, so the three Hs. But what are the benefits? Well, the benefits are, I think, really being able to reach out to people and to resonate with people -- particularly in a difficult economy -- about families and about issues related to health care and the sandwich generation of women taking care of children, but also taking care of aging parents.

PERRYAnd so, I think women do have those opportunities. It would be great, though, if someday we were here speaking about the fact that there is not much difference and that we just don't even notice the fact that there is a woman running versus a man. And I remember several years ago going to -- actually it was 25 years ago now, going to Justice Brennan and talking to him at the Supreme Court about race and gender and that being a focus in appointments. And he said, oh, I hope that 50 years from now, no one will even notice. And I stop and think about that, we're halfway to his 50-year mark (laugh) and I'm not sure with race or gender that it's going to disappear soon as the topic of conversation.

NNAMDIChristina, a lot of the strength of the Tea Party right now seem to be -- seems to be associated with female leaders, from Sarah Palin to Michele Bachmann. Could appointing Wasserman Schultz be part of a strategy to address that on the Democratic side?

BELLANTONIIt's certainly -- it changes the conversation a little bit because, you know, as she was just discussing, this is an area -- you do speak differently to a woman. You know, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz can go out there and be very aggressive and attack Republicans wherever she wants, but people have to be careful in the way that they speak back to her. We saw this obviously during the 2008 presidential campaign with the Sarah Palin lipstick-on-a-pig comment, all of these things it's just a little bit more sensitive, and those are sort of the political facts. So I think that she has an opportunity there to be able to be very aggressive and people can't necessarily return the favor.

BELLANTONIBut what's also interesting about her is she emerging as the next real leader of the Democratic Party. You know, certainly, they're going to be looking at a bench in 2016 regardless of what happens with the 2012 presidential race. Nancy Pelosi is probably going to be leaving Congress at some point. She's in her 70s and isn't really interested in being the future of the Democratic Party. So perhaps this congresswoman, you know, in her 40s, a young mom, she's able to prove herself, she has a political future.

NNAMDIChristina, you wrote an article for this month's More magazine, and in it you talked about the newly energized women of the Tea Party. What mobilized this group of women who previously did not consider themselves to be political?

BELLANTONIMany different things. In most cases, it was their children. What I did is I set about meeting Tea Partiers all over the country. I first went to Minnesota in St. Cloud, which is ground zero for Michelle Bachmann. And these women had met her at a Tea Party rally and really felt inspired. And what they told me was they finally felt liberated to speak their views. They'd always felt a little hemmed in and silenced by -- you know, they used the example of being at the Thanksgiving dinner table and their children were all very excited about Barack Obama, and they felt almost guilty talking about the fact that they didn't agree with him politically.

BELLANTONISo you have that, and you have sort of strong women like Palin, like Bachmann suddenly talking about conservative viewpoints that allowed them to be free of that. But then you also had the fact that Obama was president and a lot of people speaking out. And then, finally, the national financial scene because mothers sit down at the kitchen table with the checkbook, and they balance their budget. And so it's just such a clear message, and you've seen a lot of female leaders.

BELLANTONIThe Tea Party Express has a female leader. Tea Party Patriot has a female leader. They're sitting down there using that exact message. You know that you can't spend more than you have in that checkbook. Why doesn't the government? And so that message is very simple. They're able to translate it. And these women are speaking out for the first time and many cases voting for the first time.

NNAMDIMy father always simply took his entire paycheck and gave it to my mother, and then said he was in charge. (laugh) Barbara, if the phenomenon that Christina was just describing is a relatively new phenomenon, why do you think this is happening now, thousands of conservative women becoming politically active?

PERRYWell, I think just to add on to what Christina said, the studies by scholars in this field, I'm thinking of Theda Skocpol, a sociologist who's done a massive study of Tea Partiers. And what she's finding is that it does tend to be women-led, tends to older white women who are not only interested in these budget issues, but they ironically are interested in what's going to happen to their Social Security, because for many women, they will only have Social Security to rely on. Many women do not have pensions or they don't have a lot in their so-called 401 (k) s.

PERRYAnd then you add to that the other children issue, which is many of them are facing in this bad economy, boomerang children. So adult children who are coming back home with grandchildren. So now their households are expanding, and they're having to cover more people with less money.

NNAMDIIs there a corresponding mobilization among women on the liberal side, Christina?

BELLANTONINot really. The groups that I mentioned that are sort of looking at this opportunity of redistricting, I mean, you're talking about fairly small Democratic groups, like EMILY's List or a few others. You know, there's obviously a very strong pro-choice movement that is predominantly female. However, it's an area where the conservative women are just -- they have places to go speak out. They're using technology. You know, one of these -- I wrote a lot about the blog asamom.org, which -- they call themselves the Sisterhood of Mommy Patriots, and they just talk and organize and get people on buses to the Capitol to protest and all those things.

BELLANTONIAnd one thing I'd like to point out, too, that I found when I was writing this piece is they're not necessarily looking for a female candidate to represent them. In many cases, they actually would prefer Sarah Palin to stay on the sidelines. They'd like to see somebody like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or some younger blood -- like Paul Ryan, for example, from Wisconsin -- potentially to run for president. So it's not just about getting a woman into higher office.

NNAMDIOn to the telephones, here is Laura in Frederick, Md. Laura, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

LAURAHi, Kojo. My -- I've been holding since the conversation about Obama, but -- I mean, sorry, Osama. I do not mean to make that confusion, but...

NNAMDIThere's only one -- you know, I excuse people for making that mistake because there's only one letter of difference between the two names. In one it's B, and the other is S. So it's an understandable error. But go ahead, please.

LAURAYes. I can kind of link it to women. I was -- though not women in politics, per se, but about Osama bin Laden being killed. I do think of his youngest wife that they -- or last wife -- I'm not sure she was his youngest -- that they said was in the home, and I wonder if there were other women and children in the home. And I read a book by bin Laden's oldest son, who disagreed with his father and left his father's lifestyle, called "Growing Up bin Laden." And it was also -- talked a lot about the lives of bin Laden's children and his wives.

LAURAAnd, I mean, certainly, they had very little choice in their lives. And I do feel sorry for those -- that woman that's been trapped there in that house and probably very traumatized and...

NNAMDIGlad you brought that up, Laura, because a lot of people have been saying that our feelings of relief, thankfulness, maybe even celebration, need to be tempered with some empathy. Christina.

BELLANTONIThat's an interesting point. I was just gonna point out that she actually -- that wife is the woman who identified him positively, saying, yes, this was Osama bin Laden who was killed, you know, when authorities were seeking for that identification, and that's gotta be a real tough position.

NNAMDILaura, thank you for your call. On to Dill -- sorry, Barbara. Did you wanna comment on that also?

PERRYNo. We'll go on to the next.

NNAMDIHere is Dill in Reston, Va. Dill, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

DILLYes. I was calling to just say that I think having women in positions of leadership in the Defense Department would be very well considering how often our wars have resulted from male macho behavior. And when you look at U.S. defense spending, which equals the rest of the world, you have to wonder why do we need to do that when our -- two of our enemies are countries like North Korea and Iran, which might spend 1 percent of what we spend. And I think it's far too often that in departments of defense all over the world, it's the confrontation mode rather than a conciliatory mode which prevails. We need to be very effective in making that change.

NNAMDIBarbara Perry, the focus on women and mothers in particular as a voting block is interesting. Sarah Palin campaigned with a baby on her hip. Women, as you pointed out, Barbara, earlier, have a variety of issues that they like to address, their Social Security. We've got soccer moms, grizzly moms, working moms. Do you think that these women see national security issues any differently than men do?

PERRYOh, yes, because they are the ones sending their children off to war if we are in war, especially in times of the draft. But think back to 1980 and the Reagan presidential run. He developed what his pollsters and others called a gender gap so that men were supporting him in much higher rates than were women, and many said it was because he was so hawkish. And I should point out, though, that the good news about this was that he appointed Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to the U.S. Supreme Court because of that gender gap.

PERRYIn the campaign, Reagan said, if I do have an opportunity to appoint a member of the Supreme Court, among my first appointees will be a woman, and he made good on that.

NNAMDIWell, Christina, you, however, talked about a tension or even outright hostility between the "mommy patriots" and feminists.

BELLANTONIYeah. I spoke to many women saying, you know, is it fair to compare your movement to sort of the rise of liberal feminism in the '60s and '70s? And several of them bristled at that, just saying, you know, absolutely not. Liberal feminists had, you know, completely different values than we did. And I ended up interviewing Phyllis Schlafy, who is just a very interesting woman. She just wrote a book about feminism herself. She was pretty candid with me. But what she -- she made a comparison that I found pretty poignant.

BELLANTONIShe compares the Tea Party and females in the Tea Party to suffragettes, saying that, you know, these were women that were willing to march and they were moms and they had conservative values and they were out there taking to the streets and getting loud and in your face.

NNAMDIBarbara, if some Tea Partiers reject feminism, many are very politically active, even advancing to high office like Michelle Bachmann. Is this a different kind of feminism that calls itself something else?

PERRYWell, I do think that the typical definitions of feminism do tend to relate to liberal causes for women, and that would be to get them to vote, which, I would make an argument, was a liberal position. Now it may be that those suffragettes were also women, for example, who believed in prohibition, which would be deemed as a conservative position, but that's also tied into family ideas. But I think the issues that EMILY's List, for example -- pro-choice, again, early -- in early years the feminist movement getting the vote for women -- those would be viewed as liberal issues.

PERRYAnd I think feminism has applied itself with that label. And so I think feminism and liberalism are always going to be conflated in the minds of Americans.

NNAMDIBarbara Perry is a senior fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Thank you for joining us.

PERRYHappy to be with you.

NNAMDIChristina Bellantoni is an associate politics editor at CQ Roll Call. Christina, always good to see you.

BELLANTONIIt was a pleasure. Thank you.

NNAMDIThank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.