“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
A “Special Kind Of Human Being”: Rick Santorum’s Despicable And Hurtful Health Care Lie
You have to want to be President awfully badly to purposely scare the hell out of parents whose children face illness and disability in their lives. You also have to be a perfectly despicable human being.
Appearing yesterday with his wife, Karen, on the Glenn Beck program, Rick Santorum joined his wife in ‘revealing’ that it was the passage of Obamacare that motivated them to enter into the presidential race.
According to Karen Santorum, “Because we have as you know a little angel, little Bella, special needs little girl, and when Obamacare passed, that was it, that put the fire in my belly.”
Had that been the end of it, I’d have no problem whatsoever with Mrs. Santorum’s comment. If Karen Santorum feels that there is a better way to protect the health and wellbeing of her child, it is not only her right but her responsibility to do everything she can on behalf of her little girl and every child out there in similar circumstances. I would fully respect her for the same even if I disagree with her assessment of what the law means to her daughter and others who suffer illness.
But it did not end there—not by a long shot. Instead, Rick Santorum chimed in his agreement by arguing that the health care law would ration care based on the ‘usefulness’ of an individual.
It’s all about utilization, right? It’s all about how do we best allocate resources where they are most effectively used? […] Government allocating resources best on how to get the best bang for your dollars and it’s all about utility. It’s all about the usefulness of the person to society, instead of the dignity of every human life and the opportunity for people who love and care for people to give them the best possibility to have the best possible life.
I don’t believe that Rick Santorum knows the first thing about dignity in a human life. He couldn’t. If he did he could not possibly have made such a statement knowing how this would cause fear for so many when it is a complete lie.
Never mind that the ACA has made it possible for children like Bella Santorum to always access health insurance, without lifetime caps and without the possibility for exclusion because of being born with a tragic illness or disability. Never mind that, because of the ACA, children born into a lifetime of medical challenges will never again face a time when they are denied the health insurance necessary to pay for their expensive healthcare needs.
And never mind that we are left to scratch our heads in wonderment that leading organizations such as the American Association of People with Disabilities, National Organization For Rare Disorders, The Arc of the United States, and numerous additional widely recognized and respected groups whose sole purpose is to represent the needs of those Santorum tells us will be deemed disposable, have not only registered their support for the ACA, but have gone to the trouble and expense to actually file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court to defend the law.
Apparently, Santorum either believes that these organizations are led by the dumbest people alive; that they have entered into some sort of deal with the devil to sell out the very people they exist to defend for reasons that escape the rational mind; or he simply could not care less that his statements will be heard by people who are the parents of special children and that they will be terrified.
Let’s take a look at the what law actually does and who it affects.
The government board that Santorum pretends to fear is the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) which is authorized to make changes to Medicare—and only Medicare. Accordingly, while some children with challenges like little Bella Santorum could find themselves qualified for coverage in Medicare, young Bella would not be affected by any decisions of the IPAB as the Santorum family has their own insurance coverage. Further, the legislative record makes clear that the IPAB is not to offer any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or increase Medicare beneficiary premiums, increase Medicare beneficiary cost sharing (deductibles, coinsurance, or co-payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria.
And if, by some evil act, the IPAB does attempt to ration healthcare, Congress has the specific authority under the law to shoot it right down.
If Rick Santorum doesn’t understand the law, he should. And if he is too lazy or finds it too inconvenient to correctly cite the law when lying is so much better for political purposes, then he could,at least, show sufficient humanity to avoid targeting his political potshots in a way designed to frighten those with challenged children.
You see, should the ACA continue to be the law of the land and Rick Santorum is not president, Santorum gets to return to his cushy lobbying gig. But all of these parents with special needs children—the people Santorum has so needlessly frightened—will be left to worry forever because Rick Santorum thought this all made for a nifty campaign pitch.
I guess when your ambition is as big as Senator Santorum’s, you can’t be worried about the damage to you do to those who are the most vulnerable.
I understand very well that many people object to the Affordable Care Act for a variety of reasons. And while I am convinced that if people better understood the law the result would be greater support for the law, this is wholly beside the point.
If your own judgment is that Obamacare is not the best way to address our healthcare problems, fine. That’s what America is all about. If you have a better idea as to how to deal with the issue then, by all means, vote for those who share your approach and work hard to make any change you believe is necessary, even if that includes repealing the Act.
However, when Rick Santorum tells us that the law would deny the right to life and the care needed to sustain that life to children like his own daughter, because such a child would be deemed to not be of ‘sufficient use to society’, he accuses the President, every member of Congress who supported the law, and every other supporter, such as myself, of being unfit to walk to this earth.
Anyone is welcomed to disagree with my judgment as to whether the Affordable Care Act is a good or a bad law. If my opinion is wrong, it won’t be the first time or the last that this will prove to be the case. But if you are going to accuse me of being willing to allow a child—or anyone else— to die because I would somehow deem her to be inconsequential to society, you’d really better be prepared to not only say that to my face but take the punishment that I promise you will follow.
What’s all the more amazing is that Santorum’s statement doesn’t even make sense.
In point of fact, the elements of the law that allegedly so concern Santorum do not even begin to ‘kick in’ until 2014. Thus, President Obama would only preside over its implementation for a very few years. And yet, Rick Santorum suggests that he is of the belief that Congresses and presidents in the years to come—some of whom will no doubt be Republican—would stand idly by while people are allowed to die because they are no longer deemed useful to society.
It is precisely because Santorum’s statement makes no sense, and precisely because he so badly cites the reality of the law, that we know that it is nothing but pure politics. And playing politics with the hearts of people whose lives are already tough enough takes a very special kind of human being—the kind that would never be welcomed at my dinner table.
American politics is a contact sport to be sure. But when the front-runner for his party’s nomination is willing to level charges such as this just to score some cheap political points while giving every parent with a challenged child a false reason to lie awake at night with worry, it is Rick Santorum’s usefulness to our society —not the value of the sick and disabled—that remains very much in question.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributing Writer, Forbes, February 25, 2012
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