“Outsourcing Jobs”: Mitt Romney Can’t Leave Women Voters To His Wife
Outsourcing the job to his wife isn’t going to solve Mitt Romney’s problem with women voters.
That, though, does seem to be the candidate’s first instinct. Romney, when asked last week about the gender gap, twice said he wished his wife could take the question.
“My wife has the occasion, as you know, to campaign on her own and also with me,” Romney told newspaper editors, “and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy.”
Note to candidate: Women aren’t a foreign country. You don’t need an interpreter to talk to them. Even if you’re not fluent in their language, they might appreciate if you gave it a try.
As if to emphasize their candidate’s unfamiliarity with the territory of gender, the Romney campaign then released a fuzzy-wuzzy video, titled “Family” and starring, of course, Ann Romney, reminiscing over grainy film and vintage snapshots.
“I hate to say it but often I had more than five sons,” Ann recalls. “I had six sons, and he would be as mischievous and as naughty as the other boys. He’d come home and” — here Romney makes the sound of a building blowing up — “everything would just explode again.”
Somehow I doubt that Ann Romney, circa 1982, having finally managed to get her five boys under control, was all that happy about their father coming home only to “get them all riled up again.” Somehow I doubt that beleaguered moms, circa 2012, listen to her story and think, “Oh, Mitt is so much more fun than I thought.” Rather, I suspect, they wonder whether he should have been doing more to lend a hand.
Indeed, the video offers an unintentional glimpse of Ann’s own frustrations. “It was hard to maneuver,” Ann notes. “I could do okay when I had the two. Three, not so bad. Four, it got to be a little much.” On the campaign trail with her husband, Ann often talks about the old days when she would be at home dealing with her rambunctious brood and Mitt would call from the road. “His consoling words were always the same: Ann, your job is more important than mine.”
This story is supposed to buttress Mitt’s bona fides as a supportive husband, and Ann is, no doubt, a more tolerant spouse than I am. But every time I hear that patronizing line, I imagine responding, “Great. If my job is more important, then you come home and do it and I’ll check into the nice room at the Four Seasons.”
Romney’s biggest problem with women voters is among those with college educations and among those under 45. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll, for example, showed President Obama leading Romney by 57 percent to 38 percent among registered women voters, while Obama lagged with men, 44 percent to Romney’s 52 percent.
However, the gender gap was markedly bigger among college-educated women, 65 percent of whom supported Obama, compared to 52 percent of those without a college education. Same with age, with 63 percent of female voters 18 to 44 backing Obama, compared to 54 percent of those 45 and older.
How many of these younger and/or better-educated women are going to identify with Ann Romney’s father-knows-best description of life in chez Romney? I understand that the candidate badly needs humanizing but, especially for general-election purposes, it would be more powerful to combine the family story with examples, assuming they exist, about Workplace Mitt promoting women or adopting family-friendly policies.
Even as Mitt was playing a bit role in his wife’s video, Obama was hosting a “White House Forum on Women and the Economy.” In an unstated yet unavoidable contrast with stay-at-home mother Ann Romney, Obama described his wife as “the woman who once advised me at the law firm in Chicago where we met” and related how Michelle Obama, after their daughters were born, “gave it her all to balance raising a family and pursuing a career.”
Obama and Romney come from different backgrounds and generations, and their experience of gender roles is inevitably different as well; if Obama connects better with younger, working women, that’s no surprise. And Romney is not alone in performing poorly with women voters. The GOP has suffered from a gender gap in every presidential election since 1980.
So Romney can lose the women’s vote and still win, but not if the gap remains this big. Narrowing it will be, in this case, a man’s job.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 10, 2012
“The Pillbox Primary”: GOP Women Being Pressed Into Service To Do What Their Husbands Cannot
It seems time to declare this election cycle the “pillbox primary,” as every day seems to bring a name, idea or concept about women in America that is so vintage it still smells like the mothballs in your grandmother’s attic.
Forget about sluts, the pill, sluts taking the pill or all-male congressional panels — those offenses are so three days ago. Let’s move on to the image of Ann Romney, Karen Santorum and Callista Gingrich cleaning up after their husbands on Tuesday night.
Ann Romney greeted the crowd in Boston with a genuine smile and an I-get-it introduction for her husband. “Do you know what women care about?” she told the hometown crowd. “Women care about jobs. Women care about the economy. They care about their children, and they care about the debt, and they’re angry.”
Darn right, Ann. Would Mitt mind if we offered you up for the brokered convention?
Or Karen Santorum, who just by standing next to Rick Santorum on stage in Steubenville, Ohio, on Tuesday night told voters there’s more to the man than the caricature he has allowed his image to become. Would a lawyer-turned-neonatal nurse like Karen really marry a caveman in a sweater vest, her smile says. Of course not.
And she’s gone one better in the last week, conducting her first national interviews of the entire campaign season to give voters a better sense of who her husband really is beyond someone who calls college graduates snobs, even though he has a law degree and an MBA.
She also revealed herself to be a keen strategist in her own right, telling CBS’s Jan Crawford that she often weighs in on Santorum’s message and suggested he not get bogged down in the contraception issue, advice he obviously ignored.
“My advice to him was stop answering the question,” she said. “Tell ’em, ‘I’m not going to answer this question. Let me tell you what I know about national security. I know a lot about national security.’ ”
For her part, Callista Gingrich has begun introducing her husband at events and even headlining a few of her own, all with a not-so-subtle message that while Newt has had his problems in the marriage department, now that he’s devoted to a brainy, blonde French horn player, how bad could he be?
Should this former Hill staffer and very poised woman really have to try to make up for Newt’s spotty track record? No, but she’s doing it with a smile on her face anyway.
There is a very June Cleaver feeling to all of this that seems below the women being pressed into service to do what their husbands cannot — come across as trustworthy, relatable and aware that the 21st century started a while ago.
A better strategy for the candidates might be for them to listen to their wives — or say goodbye to the women’s vote in November. (You do know women make up 55 percent of voters, right?)
After polls earlier this year showed women voters drifting away from President Obama, an NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll this week showed Republicans have reversed that trend.
They are now losing ground so fast among women that they will have a hard time making it up in the general election. Women now approve of the job the president is doing 54 percent to 40 percent, while the president leads Romney in a head-to-head match up 55 percent to 37 percent among women.
It’s hard to think that the last month in Republican politics did not have nearly everything to do with that.
No amount of sending Ann, Karen or Callista in front of the cameras will make women forget seeing only men discuss contraception for women, or hearing Rush Limbaugh unleash a sickening perversion against a female law student, only to be greeted by silence on the right.
The Republican candidates can turn the tide by leading their party in a better direction — with policies that strengthen the country, plans to improve the future for children, and a little respect in the form of telling Limbaugh that his instinct to talk about prostitutes while the rest of us were talking about health care and religious liberty is making us all wonder what he does in his free time.
Maybe somewhere out there is a woman who can help him clean up his mess, too.
By: Patricia Murphy, She The People, The Washington Post, March 8, 2012
“Poo Fighter”: A History Of Mitt Romney And Diapers
Most people do not look forward to changing their baby’s diapers. Not everyone. But most people. Which is understandable — it’s not a pleasant experience. You never know what kind of noxious, exotic things you’re going to find in there.
But Mitt Romney, in particular, really despises diapers.
We were reminded of this yesterday when Romney, at a town hall in Ohio, went off on a tangent about his family:
“Grandkids are fabulous!” he said. “You don’t have to change their diapers and, and they love you.”
This is telling. When describing the benefits of grandchildren, Romney places the absence of diaper-changing responsibilities — a seemingly minor factor — on par with unconditional love. It’s like saying, “Being president is incredible: There’s a bowling alley right in your basement, and also, you get to shape the future of the world.” It’s also unclear whether Romney would still find grandkids fabulous if they offered him love and required diaper-changing. Grandkids, under that scenario, might be “just okay.”
The funny thing is, Ann Romney has praised her husband for teaching her how to change diapers when they first had a baby. According to a December 2007 AP report:
Ann Romney traveled with her husband Saturday, testifying to the little-known qualities she believes make him the preferred Republican presidential contender.
She said … that her husband taught her how to both change a diaper and feed a baby, experience she lacked when she had the first of their five boys.
It turns out that before he had children of his own, Romney was wiping and powdering on a regular basis, as Ann testified:
“I did not grow up in these big Mormon families and all these kids and everything; I really grew up in the country in Michigan, and I never held a baby until I had my own.”
Romney had experience in holding, feeding and cleaning babies from taking care of his nieces and nephews.
“So, he comes in handy,” his wife said.
Well, not that handy, actually. After teaching his wife how to change a diaper, Romney — apparently scarred by years of changing diapers for his entire extended Mormon family — stopped doing it himself, save for the most tolerable cases:
I was willing to change the urine-soaked diapers, but the messier types gave me dry heaves,” he told GQ magazine in 2007. “So my wife allowed me to escape that.”
Dry heaves? A bit dramatic, no? The man who promises to get tough on China and do whatever it takes to stop Iran from going nuclear also cowers in the face of baby poo?
By: Dan Amira, Daily Intel, March 1, 2012
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