“Warrior Against Women”: Romney Plays With Fire In Effort To Recapture Women
Last week, Romney campaign press secretary, Andrea Saul, set off a firestorm when she tweeted, “FACT: Women account for 92.3 percent of jobs loss under @BarackObama.”
Before you knew it, the Romney campaign had locked onto the statistic and made it the centerpiece of their effort to turn the corner on the mass defection of female voters to Obama—a stampede that, should it hold up, will make it very difficult for the Governor to defeat the President in November.
The strategy is a tricky one—although it certainly doesn’t hurt the Romney meme that Ms. Saul’s statement is factually true.
However, there is a great deal more to the story and—should women become acquainted with the facts rather than the bumper sticker—Governor Romney may find that he has dug the hole deeper by trying to pull a fast one on female voters. Unlike we male troglodytes, women tend to pay closer attention to the facts because…well…because they are smarter then men.
To get to the truth behind the numbers, we begin with Gary Burtless, a labor market expert with the non-partisan Brookings Institute, who highlights what took place during the recessionary period that began in December 2007.
I think males were disproportionately hurt by employment losses in manufacturing and especially construction, which is particularly male-dominated. A lot of job losses in those two industries had already occurred before Obama took office. Industries where women are more likely to be employed – education, health, the government – fared better in terms of job loss. In fact, health and education employment continued to grow in the recession and in the subsequent recovery. Government employment only began to fall after the private economy (and private employment) began growing again.
Burtless’ perspective is borne out by data that reveals that men lost 5,355,000 jobs during the recessionary period that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009 when things began turning around, albeit unconvincingly. During that same period, women lost 2,124,000 jobs. Thus, during the recession, roughly 72 percent of all the jobs lost were taken from the men.
Oddly, it was not until things started moving in a better direction that women began experiencing the lion’s share of the pain.
There is a reason for this. What followed the recession were the deep cuts in state and local government jobs—jobs that tend to be filled by women in far greater numbers then men.
According to Joan Entmacher, vice president and director of family economic security at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C., while the private sector has added more than 2.5 million jobs since March 2010, state and local government jobs have been cut by 500,000—the majority of these jobs once belonging to women.
What’s more, it turns out that this pattern of men getting fired first followed by women losing their gigs just when men are beginning to return to work is a pattern that has held in previous recessions.
So, can you rationally blame this female job loss problem on President Obama?
Some could argue that had the President’s policies brought about a more emphatic recovery, states and localities would be racking up greater tax receipts, giving them more money to spend and, as a result, would not have found it necessary to cut so many of the jobs that have put women out of work disproportionately.
But to make that argument, you would necessarily have to support keeping or returning women to their state and local government jobs.
This is a problem when one acknowledges that it is the Romney side of the political ledger that makes ‘small government’ a hallmark of their reason for being. Thus, even if there were more dollars available to fund government at all levels, it seems fair to point out that conservatives would strenuously argue that the money should remain in the pockets of the taxpayers and not be shuttled off to government coffers to be spent on more public workers.
This is where it gets a bit sticky for the Romney camp.
It’s awfully hard to pursue a position that conflicts with your central reason for being—let alone making it a major campaign plank. If you support smaller government, you necessarily support fewer government employees. If those employees happen to be women— because women make up the majority of people who hold these jobs—you can’t really grouse about their job loss when the very act of their losing the job is a fulfillment of a critically important piece in your political platform.
And if you do decide to grouse, you run the risk of being exposed for a measure of hypocrisy.
It is no secret that a great many of the government job losses have come in education where states have cut back spending dramatically in response to budgetary problems. It is also no secret,as the following chart reveals, that the teaching profession—overwhelmingly dominated by women—has taken a major hit during the recent, post-recession years.
So, do we blame Obama for the firing of so many teachers?
Education budgets are controlled by the states. Of the top ten states that have made the deepest cuts into education, eight of them are under the firm control of Republicans.
Oops.
Meanwhile, reviewing the only three states that have increased funding for education during the past year—Maryland, South Carolina and Massachusetts—we find that two are led by Democrats. Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina is the only Republican governor in the nation to increase spending on education.
Now, one can again suggest that a more robust recovery would have allowed these GOP governors and legislators to hold onto more of the teaching workforce. However, when it comes to cutting state and local jobs, blaming the President is somewhat akin to blaming him for the state proposals we’ve seen over the past few months attempting to subject women to vaginal ultrasound testing before an abortion is permitted.
At the end of the day, there is simply no rational basis to pin the loss of women’s jobs following the recession on the President. When taking in all the information, the argument just does not hold up.
In some respects, I have sympathy for Governor Romney in having to wear the mantle of a ‘warrior against women’. He didn’t start this. Indeed, there is ample evidence that he has not discriminated against women throughout his career and campaign.While right to life supporters might take issue with my cutting the governor such a break, given Romney’s flip-flop on the subject of abortion, I remain convinced that Romney is, in reality, no more opposed to abortion rights than he was when he was the Governor of Massachusetts.
Of course, the governor didn’t help himself with his milquetoast response to Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Sandra Fluke just as his campaign did him no favors yesterday when it appeared they had never heard of or, at the least, yet to form an opinion when asked about the Lilly Ledbetter Act—the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Obama and one aimed at improving women’s access to the courts to redress pay discrimination.
Fair or not, as the party standard bearer, Governor Romney takes on the troubles caused by Limbaugh and the many GOP state and federal legislators who have come up with some pretty bizarre, old century ideas that are the stuff of the “war against women.” If he’s going to overcome the handicap, I suspect he’s going to have to do much better than attempting a little misdirection in the effort to fool female voters.
Why?
Because if the women of America are anything like my own wife—and I strongly suspect that they are—the Governor’s ploy is a non-starter that will easily be found out.
If Romney wants the women to come back, he’s going to have to do much better.
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes, April 12, 2012
Mitt’s “New Concern For Women”: Hard For Romney To Claim Obama Is Waging A War On Women
As part of Mitt Romney’s ongoing attemptto project all of his weakness onto President Obama, the presumed GOP nominee is accusing his general election opponent of waging a “war on women.”
Democrats have used the same charge to highlight Republicans’ systematic attacks on women’s rights, but Romney flipped the claim at a rally last night night, saying, “The real war on women has been the job losses as the result of the Obama economy.” He continued the attack on Fox News this morning, where he repeatedly went out of his way to attack Obama’s record on women:
ROMNEY: Over 92 percent of the jobs lost under this president where lost by women. His policies have been really a war on women. … Women in particular suffered under this presidency. Watch it: http://youtu.be/F7H_FcJifM0
The “92 percent” statistic that Romney cites is highly misleading. For one thing, it attributes to Obama job losses from January 2009 — a terrible month for jobs — before he was even sworn in as president, and long before his policies were enacted. If you count the entirety of the recession beginning in 2007, 39.7 percent of the jobs lost — less than half — were lost by women.
The reason women’s job losses are skewed towards the end of the recession is that the earlier job losses were largely in male-dominated industries such as construction. Women, meanwhile, tend to work in industries that have been hit harder on the back end of the recession, such as education and health care — public sector jobs that have been decimated by GOP austerity budgeting. Princeton University Professor Betsey Stevenson told Politifact that “in every recession men’s job loss occurs first and most, with unemployment rates for men being more cyclical than those of women’s.”
Meanwhile, Obama has enacted policies to help women, like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, designed to help close the pay gap between the genders. This morning, Romney’s campaign wouldn’t say if their candidate supports the law, which was blocked by Senate Republicans. In fact, the campaign couldn’t offer any coherent explanation for how Obama has waged a “war on women” at all.
On health care — which polls show is women’s number one issue, beating even the economy — Obama’s health reform law includes a number of provisions to help women women, such as free preventive services and better access to contraception, both of which were enacted over opposition from Republican lawmakers. Meanwhile, Romney has called for eliminating Planned Parenthood and restricting access to contraception.
Romney’s concern for women is a new development, likely spurred by very bad polling for him, as just last month he told a college student concerned about losing access to her insurance-covered contraception, “vote for the other guy.”
By: Alex Seitz-Wald and Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, April 11, 2012
“Regressive And Counterproductive”: What A Romney-Rubio Administration’s Immigration Policy Would Look Like
Mitt Romney is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee now that Rick Santorum has dropped out of the race, and Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) name has frequently been mentioned as a possible vice presidential pickfor Romney to help him win over Hispanic voters.
But if Romney chose Rubio as his vice president and won, what would a Romney-Rubio administration set for its immigration policy? Nothing that would help fix the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system, according to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress, based on their existing polices:
A Romney-Rubio administration would advance the following counterproductive legislative priorities:
-Make E-Verify, the nation’s flawed internet-based work-authorization system, mandatory for all employers in the hope that undocumented immigrants will self-deport
-Pursue a “DREAM-less” DREAM Act, which would grant legal status but no path to earn citizenship for unauthorized immigrants who were brought here at a young ageWe can also be certain that a Romney-Rubio administration would adopt the following regressive administrative priorities:
–Support for states seeking to pass anti-immigrant laws like Arizona’s S.B. 1070
-Implementation of a comprehensive “self-deportation” strategy for undocumented immigrants in which the government would make life as miserable as possible to try to force undocumented immigrants to leave the country on their own
-Elimination of prosecutorial discretion that helps enforcement agents prioritize serious criminals over nannies and busboys
–Construction of another 1,400 miles of border fencing despite the exorbitant cost
“Voters should ask themselves whether they want to support a potential administration with immigration positions far more extreme than their own,” the reports’ authors write.
Romney has tried to woo Hispanic voters in his campaign, even winning a majority of the demographic in the Florida GOP primary. But his extreme immigration stances have also alienated Hispanic voters. A recent poll showed that President Obama is leading Romney among Hispanic voters 70 to 14 percent. Judging from the policies that could be expected, Romney may need more than Rubio as a potential vice president to win over the fastest-growing segment of the population.
By: Amanda Peterson Beadle, Think Progress, April 11, 2012
“Women’s Right’s Are Not Safe”: Romney’s Model Supreme Court Justices Voted Against Lilly Ledbetter
Earlier today, the Romney campaign responded to a question about whether their candidate supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act’s protection of equal pay for women with an awkward six second silence, followed by a promise to “get back” with an answer about whether or not Romney actually supports equal pay for women. The campaign has spent the rest of the day engaged in ham-handed damage control — first by putting out a statement saying that he is “not looking to change current law,” then by releasing statements by Republican congresswomen who previously voted against the Ledbetter Act.
Yet for all of Romney’s equivocating on whether or not he actually believes that women should be paid the same amount as men who do the exact same job, Romney cannot hide two important facts. The Ledbetter Act was only necessary because of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision which overruled decades of precedent protecting equal pay for equal work; and Romney promised to appoint more justices like the ones who voted against Lilly Ledbetter.
Last November, Romney listed four sitting Justices as the models he will follow if he gets to appoint a justice of his own — Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. Every single one of these justices voted against Lilly Ledbetter and against equal pay for women in the workplace. Just like they have voted in favor of corporate immunity from the law on issues ranging from forced arbitration to enabling corporations to buy and sell elections.
But, of course, Congress overruled the Supreme Court’s error in the Ledbetter case when it passed the Ledbetter Act, and Romney now says that he doesn’t want to change “current law.” So doesn’t that mean women’s current rights to equal pay are safe?
Not if Romney gets to appoint any more conservative justices. Just months after Congress spanked the Supreme Court by overruling their attack on women in Ledbetter, the five conservative justices handed down a very similar opinion stripping many older workers of their right to be free from employment discrimination. Worse, in taking away many older workers’ ability to protect their jobs, the Court left no doubt that it was thumbing its nose at precedent. Although longstanding law clearly established that the justices’ assault on older workers was wrongly decided, the Court’s conservatives choose to ignore this law because “it is far from clear that the Court would have the same approach were it to consider the question today in the first instance.” In other words, now that conservatives are in charge, they are free to do whatever they want.
Given that the conservative justices renewed their attack on workers so soon after the Ledbetter Act became law, and that they did so in an opinion that expressly stated that they do not care about precedents or established law, women simply cannot be sure that these same justices won’t hand down another decision much like Ledbetter if given the opportunity to do so. Mitt Romney may claim that he does not want to change “current law” in a way that harms working women, but if he gets to add more justices like Roberts or Scalia to the Supreme Court, he won’t have to. The Supreme Court will do it for him.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, April 11, 2012
“A Strategic Dilemma”: How Santorum Boxed In Romney
Rick Santorum’s departure from the presidential race could not come soon enough for Mitt Romney. In proving himself more tenacious than anyone predicted, Santorum dramatized one of Romney’s major problems, created another and forced the now-inevitable Republican nominee into a strategic dilemma.
Republicans may condemn class warfare, but their primaries turned into a class struggle. Romney performed best among voters with high incomes, and he was consistently weaker with the white working class, even in the late primaries where he put Santorum away. And Romney cannot win without rolling up very large margins among less well-off whites.
At the same time, Santorum’s strength among evangelical Christians pressured Romney to toughen his positions even as the Republican Party as a whole, at both the state and national levels, has pushed policies on contraception and abortion that have alienated many women, particularly the college-educated.
This is Romney’s other problem: Among college-educated white men, Romney had a healthy 57 percent to 39 percent lead over President Obama in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. But among college-educated white women, Obama led Romney by 60 percent to 40 percent. This netted to a rather astounding 38-point gender gap, compared with a net 27-point gap among all white voters. (Thanks to Peyton Craighill of The Washington Post’s polling staff for extracting these numbers, which are based on registered voters.) Overall, the poll taken before Santorum left the race showed Obama leading Romney by 51 percent to 44 percent.
Thus the box the primaries built for Romney: He must simultaneously court evangelical Christians and working-class voters who have eluded him so far and also reassure socially moderate women higher up the class ladder who, for now, are providing Obama with decisive margins. It’s not easy to do both.
Even if the most conservative Republicans who supported Santorum and Newt Gingrich largely fall into line out of antipathy to Obama, Romney still has to worry about whether they’ll be enthusiastic enough to turn out in the large numbers he’ll need. Yet if he concentrates on winning back upscale women, who now favor Obama by even larger margins than they gave him in 2008, Romney will only aggravate his enthusiasm problem on the right.
Romney’s predicament is Obama’s opportunity. The president is moving aggressively to take advantage of the class opening afforded him by the candidate of “a couple of Cadillacs,” “I like being able to fire people” and “corporations are people, my friend.” In a series of speeches in Florida the day Santorum withdrew, Obama hit repeatedly on the twin themes of fairness and opportunity. He called for a nation in which “everybody gets a fair shot, and everybody does a fair share, and everybody plays by the same set of rules,” while eviscerating Rep. Paul Ryan’s fiscal plan, which Romney supports, as a budget “that showers the wealthiest Americans with even more tax cuts.”
Most conservatives seem oblivious to the party’s working-class problem, but not all. Henry Olsen, a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, says Republicans need to understand that the GOP’s success in the 2010 House races was built in less affluent districts at a moment when Obama’s approval rating among white working-class men was so low “that it was only a few points higher than Richard Nixon’s was at the time of his resignation.”
Olsen sees Obama’s echoes of Bill Clinton’s pledges to help those who “work hard and play by the rules” as shrewd politics aimed at rehabilitating his standing with such Americans. And in Romney, Obama faces a candidate whose “troubles in the primary electorate demonstrated his trouble in connecting with the white working class.” Romney, Olsen says, “has difficulties with his background, difficulties with his manner, some difficulties Obama shares.”
Romney isn’t losing downscale whites. The Post/ABC poll showed him leading Obama by 19 points among white voters without a college education. The problem: That’s roughly the lead John McCain had in this group in 2008, and we know who won that election. Obama, Olsen said, can lose the white working class “by a substantial margin” and still win because of his strength among African Americans, Latinos and well-educated women.
Yes, it’s still early. Renewed economic jitters in Europe could spoil a fragile U.S. recovery. But for now, Romney finds himself in a political maze with no obvious path out. He’s there partly because of his own mistakes, but he was also led to this point because of the unlikely strength of Rick Santorum’s challenge.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 11, 2012
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