Bush grows increasingly distant from women’s issues By Myriam Marquez, ORLANDO SENTINEL

Look at all that gloating testosterone. If ever there was an image that testifies to President Bush’s growing disconnect with women voters, it’s the bill-signing ceremony last week to ban a type of late-term abortion that Republicans have dubbed partial-birth abortion.

There was the president surrounded by smiling white men, all members of Congress. Not one woman in the bunch, even though this law will affect women with problem pregnancies first and foremost.

Where were women from Feminists for Life or other female-led groups that sought this ban? In their place – in the audience. …

The bill signing had Bush aide Karl Rove’s decidedly ham-handed imprints all over it. Rove is the darling of the religious right, and it looks as if the Bush administration has made a calculation to turn off independents and even some Democratic women who gave Bush their vote in 2000. Such a strategy seeks to capture about 4 million religious conservatives who stayed away in the last presidential election.