Woman of the year?

THANK GOD for the Year of the Woman. Otherwise, there'd be almost nothing to make a Year of the out of Here in Chicago, it certainly won't be the Year of the Cubs or the White Sox, who are waging their annual battle for second place. Nor, in much of Illinois, will it be the Year of the Tomato; as elsewhere in the Midwest, tomatoes hang huge but green on the vines, apparently unable to summon the shame to redden.

Some blame Al Gore's New Pantheism, which encourages permissiveness and immodesty throughout Gaia's creation. Others fear it's a collapse of the Year of Rio, when equatorial rain forests were to have begun the long march toward Winnipeg. A great sense of unease is stirring among the Global Warmers during this summer of record cold. Perhaps they are actually caught in an interglacial period, waiting to be ground into intellectual goo by rivers of dirty ice.

Nevertheless, although Chicago baseball, tomatoes, and global warming are out this summer, it is still the Year of the Woman. And in Illinois, the Woman of the Year is Carol Moseley Braun, catapulted by a flukeish three-man (whoops, three-person) primary from a Great Gildersleevish sort of job in Cook County government (Recorder of Deeds) to the threshold of the U.S. Senate. If she makes it through the door--and for the moment she's running ahead about 3 to 1 in the polls--she'll be the first black Democratic senator and the first black woman senator ever.

Whoever is in charge of central casting for The Year of productions--the Democratic National Committee, Norman Lear, Gaia herself-couldn't have invented a more correct central character. She's 44, a product of Chicago's "reform" movement, the daughter of a policeman and a medical technician who began life in a middle-class neighborhood, and in her teens, when her parents divorced, went to live with her grandmother in a black Chicago neighborhood called "Bucket of Blood." "I had a chance to be part of the black experience on a lot of different levels," she says, and it was this experience that she says led her to choose a career in government and politics. That career began in Chicago as an assistant U.S. attorney under Jim Thompson and his assistant, Sam Skinner. She won her first election as a state representative in 1978, and in 1983 became legislative floor leader in Springfield for Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor.

After personal problems which included family deaths and a divorce, Mrs. Braun was elected in 1988 as Cook County Recorder of Deeds. The job doesn't sound like much, and it isn't. But she made political history by becoming the first black of either sex to win executive office in Cook County government. And in the process, she also established the base from which to launch her campaign for the senatorial nomination--a campaign she undertook, she says, because she could not stomach Alan Dixon's support of Clarence Thomas and the Senate's treatment of Anita Hill.

Her victory, to put it mildly, was improbable. But so is celebrity, and she was the right person for the right part at precisely the right time.

Yesterday she was a charter member of an organization called Illinois Women for Government--or, as the group calls itself, "Babes in Government." Today Barbra Streisand and Goldie Hawn raise funds for her. At an outdoor concert at Ravinia, where music lovers go to sit on the grass and recycle white wine to the mosquitoes, Peter, Paul, and Mary interrupted their concert to introduce her to the crowd. She drew more applause than Puff, the Magic Dragon.

Her record as a legislator in Springfield was consistently liberal, soft on crime but bullish on taxing and spending. However, she did win the respect of the Illinois political establishment. It is perhaps indicative that her deputy campaign manager, Jill Zwick, is also a Republican nominee for a Kane County Board seat.

Personally, as a divorced mother who has raised a 14-year-old son in what appears to be exemplary fashion, and a woman whom the New York Times's Isabel Wilkerson describes as "a den mother with a cheerleader's smile," her appeal is strong and basic. Nor is it just cupcakes and spice. According to one visitor to her Chicago office, there is a sign hanging in her restroom that reads, "I'm 51 per cent sweetheart, 49 per cent bitch. Don't push it." We'll see.

Then there's her opponent, Rich Williamson, a corporate lawyer who held a number of staff jobs in Washington, among them heading President Reagan's office of intergovernmental relations and later serving as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. Williamson has also held office in the American Conservative Union, and in 1980 attempted to impose order on Phil Crane's presidential campaign.

Williamson wouldn't be central casting's first choice for heavy. For one thing, he's too comfortable. At 43, father of three handsome children and husband of a striking and intelligent woman who serves on the Illinois Board of Higher Education, Williamson is a former football player working on a milk-and-cookies suburban sort of portliness.

For another, he speaks with a browwrinkling, low-keyed kind of earnestness in a nasal voice with just a hint of a twang. Moreover, he does this in an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other amateur-speaker fashion that often undercuts his thunderbolts ("She favors the decriminalization of marijuana!", for instance, or "She's a career politician!"). And to top it all off, he sometimes punctuates his remarks with a startling high-pitched giggle.

It's hard indeed to cast a man like this as a villain. And, to be fair, Williamson accepted the Republican nomination when no one else would take it, and he thought he would be running against an incumbent, not a Happening. But to a great extent this is irrelevant. What Williamson needs are perceived positions on important issues. As he sees it, those positions must loosen his opponent's grip on the women's vote. And there's certainly a case to be made here.

It begins with the national ticket. In 1988, George Bush took Illinois by only a percentage point. Thus, if Williamson is to squeak out a win, or if he is to help the President do so, he has to find a way to shave a couple of percentage points off the Democratic total. And that is where the women's vote comes in.

The theory here is that many Republican women, especially in the suburbs, crossed over to vote for Carol Moseley Braun in the primary. All available figures confirm the crossover. So the Williamson campaign has apparently decided to structure itself according to the official requirements for Year of the Woman political contests. Hence the peculiar behavior on the abortion issue.

Last August, Williamson signed a pledge drawn up by Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum declaring total support for the anti-abortion plank in the Republican platform. But then a few months later he began to hedge, at one point declaring, "I kind of like being called multiple-choice on abortion." Finally, in Houston, he went all the way, becoming single-choice by endorsing and being endorsed by the ebullient Ann Stone.

"By Rich and I [sic] standing here today," said Mrs. Stone, "we once again destroy the myth that Phyllis Schlafly and crew try to put out that this is a liberal-conservative battle."

Mrs, Schlafly's comment was much more succinct: "turncoat."

Representative Henry Hyde, who should be running for the Senate--or for that matter for President--was gentler. "I'm disappointed," he said, 'but I want him to win." Mr. Hyde also added this: "Believe in something and stand for it. You can't stand on two stools because they will separate and you'll get a political hernia."

On the abortion issue, the political and ideological stools have separated. But it's still a long way to November, and it remains to be seen whether the severity of the herniation is worth the calculated tradeoff.

Many things could happen between now and then. Carol Moseley Braun is less a candidate than a political event. And events can end abruptly. She speaks well and interestingly, but seldom on what are generally viewed as substantive issues. If Williamson is able to force her into more than two perfunctory debates (and if he hires a voice coach), he just might be able to take her on the issues, and in the process more clearly define himself.

In the meantime, Carol Moseley Braun is on a roll, and it's a tall order indeed to derail the leading contender for Woman of the Year in the Year of the Woman especially when you let your opponent set the rules.