Women are a swing vote this year, so I managed to get over to the Lifetime Networks Young Women's Leadership Summit, part of their everywomancounts campaign. They were in Denver last week and the bus rolled in to St. Paul yesterday. I took a short video (my first, it worked!, shown below) and captured part of Rep. Marsha Blackburn's talk. Blackburn has been in Alaska and Iraq and had a few observations about leadership, and Gov. Sarah Palin. First up though, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, a swing state in 2008, spoke to the winning 16-22 year olds about becoming a future frontrunner. Capito was chairman of the women's caucus in Congress, which sees its greatest number of women serving this session. She said it's not harder for women to get elected, as a woman it's usually an advantage, giving a nod to the historic candidacy of Sen. Hillary Clinton and Rep. Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker.Capito believes women more family oriented, and on the caucus they went right to bipartisan issues. When she was chairwoman they looked at sexual assault in the military, international sexual trafficking, and global patterns of disease. Capito addressed the vice presidential candidacy of Gov. Sarah Palin, "Sen. Clinton showed a woman can be qualified and ready" and she is, "proud we have a woman on our side to represent our ticket". She felt it was important to start at the city council or county commission level, get involved in a campaign and build up a network.
After she spoke one of the questions--how do you get your voice heard when you have disagreements? Rep. Capito smiled and said you may have some disagreements, but in the end you're reflecting back what your constituents elected you to do.
Here's the video of Rep. Marsha Blackburn:
--crossposted at BlogHer
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