HOW TO WOO WOMEN VOTERS - UK

UK Leaders Bank On ‘Family Man’ Image For An Edge In Tight Race
Sarah Lyall

London: They have submitted to sharp questioning in live web chats on Mumsnet, the popular social networking site for mothers. They have sat for lengthy interviews with Cosmopolitan, Glamour and other femalefriendly publications, and regularly deployed their wives in an effort to establish good domestic-coziness credentials.
As they prepare for the May 6 national election, the leaders of Britain’s main political parties are relentlessly presenting themselves as diaper-changing, beachstrolling, stroller-pushing, maternity-leave-supporting, dinner-cooking family men.
Commentators are calling it the “Mumsnet election,” a reference both to the website that has become a new station of the cross for Britain’s politicians and to the added significance, in a tight race, of the amorphous thing known as the women’s vote. With the polls showing that many women are still undecided, the parties are working all the angles to seek their support.
The new approach is most evident in the Conservative Party, which in the old days was a bastion of stuffy masculinity whose leaders scoffed at socalled political correctness and whose wives knew that their place was in the shadows.
Not so for David Cameron. Cameron, 43, calls his wife, Samantha, his “secret weapon,” and she is turning out to be just that, with a prominent role in the campaign.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s wife, Sarah, 46, is an active participant in his career, functioning as the designated humanizer of a man who can seem dour, distracted and dysfunctional. Sarah, a constant Twitterer with more than 1.1 million followers, is also active in Mumsnet.
The site was a virtual meeting place for mothers but now, with 850,000 members, is seen as a potent force, both a reflection of and a way to influence a group that functions as UK’s equivalent of the American soccer mom. NYT NEWS SERVICE