Beyond the Dome

It looks like the Democrats will have their chance to turn the Senate’s vote on pay equity in April into a top-tier national issue. Convention officials just announced that Lilly Ledbetter, the Goodyear supervisor who lost a Supreme Court case over wage discrimination, will be one of the speakers at the Democratic convention in Denver, giving the party a chance to tell voters once again that Republicans don’t care enough about the issue.

Ledbetter will be in the Tuesday night lineup next week, the same night that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York gives her “headline primetime” speech. (Not the keynote, mind you, just a really important speech from the groundbreaking candidate who came oh-so-close to being the nominee herself.)

By adding Ledbetter to the lineup, the Democrats will be able to whip up national outrage over her story — she discovered she was being paid less than her male coworkers, only to be told by the Supreme Court that she should have sued within 180 days, except it’s generally hard to discover these things within 180 days, etc.

They’ll also be able to flog John McCain, who missed the Senate vote but said he opposed the bill — which would have made it easier to prevail in wage-discrimination lawsuits — because the approach “opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems” and because women “need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else.” Expect to hear that last quote a few thousand times between now and November.

But it’s a good bet that they’ll mention the Senate vote, too. Both Clinton and Barack Obama flew back from the campaign trail to vote for the bill, but it died because it fell short of the 60 votes that were needed to begin the actual debate on the bill. Only six Republicans voted to move ahead.

In case anyone missed the linkage, a memo the Obama campaign sent out this afternoon — “Does McCain Have a Woman Problem,” by Dana Singiser, Clinton’s former director of women’s outreach and now the director of Obama’s women’s vote program — uses McCain’s opposition to the Senate bill as an example of his alleged vulnerabilities among women voters.

So the Ledbetter speech could be a “two-fer” for the Democrats — a chance to boost Obama’s credentials with women voters while also begging them to send more Democrats to the Senate. McCain’s rapid-response team is already on it. In a statement, spokesman Tucker Bounds accused Obama of “refusing to acknowledge that the legislation he’s promoting has more to do with paychecks for trial lawyers than the struggles of working women.”

But if McCain economic adviser Carly Fiorina isn’t already on the Republican convention speakers’ lineup, they’re probably writing her in right now.