“The New Wedge Issue”: It’s A Scary Time To Be A Woman
Last Friday, the Obama campaign released an ad in several swing states attacking Mitt Romney for his stance on abortion. “It’s a scary time to be a woman—Mitt Romney is just so out of touch,” says a woman named Jenni. A narrator explains that Mitt Romney opposes requiring insurance coverage for contraceptives, supports overturning Roe v. Wade, and once backed a bill that would outlaw all abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. The ad concludes: “We need to attack our problems, not a woman’s choice.”
In recent elections, presidential candidates have been wary of diving into explosive abortion politics; in 2008, only $4 million was spent on abortion-related advertising, compared with $39 million on budget-related ads or $88 million on environmental ones. It’s an issue the public remains divided on. According to Gallup, the proportion of Americans identifying as “pro-choice” hit a record low of 41 percent this year, while those describing themselves as “pro-life” hovered around 50 percent. “The minute you take positions on the abortion issue, there are a lot of people you’re alienating,” explains Susan Carroll, a Senior Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “Usually, candidates try to run away from the issue.” So why is the Obama campaign running toward it?
One reason might be to remind voters of the “War on Women.” Republican lawmakers’ and presidential candidates’ ugly policy proposals this spring—forcing vaginal ultrasounds, defunding Planned Parenthood, weakening the Violence Against Women Act, fighting access to contraception—created an opportunity for Democrats to shave off women voters from the GOP. President Obama had the support of fewer than half of women under 50 in February; by April he was polling above 60 percent, outgunning Romney 2-to-1. But the gap has narrowed in recent months. The Obama ad serves both to remind women of the GOP’s recent history and to tie Romney to the attack on reproductive rights.
Still, the question remains why the Obama campaign didn’t stick to safer ground, focusing on the GOP’s attacks on contraception or maternity care—both broadly unpopular. The answer lies in the Republican Party’s shift to the right. A decade ago, between 30 and 40 percent of Republicans identified as pro-choice. This May, that number was a scant 22 percent. It’s hard to know whether that’s the result of Republicans changing their minds about abortion, or pro-choice respondents ceasing to identify as Republicans. But the result is the same: The party is increasingly uniform in its opposition to abortion.
This, in turn, has opened up an opportunity for Democrats. For most Americans, the abortion question is not all-or-nothing—it’s about where one draws the line. Opinion polling on abortion is highly sensitive to phrasing; despite a majority of the country identifying as “pro-life,” polls also consistently show that a majority of respondents supports access to abortion in at least some circumstances. Politicians have been walking this tightrope for years—“I’m personally pro-life but believe in a woman’s right to choose”; “I believe the issue should be left up to the states to decide”; “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” With the GOP moving further to the right, a wider space has opened for Democrats to pick up abortion moderates. As Ed Kilgore wrote in Washington Monthly earlier this year, if a woman’s right to choose continues to be eroded around the country, it could become more likely that the quiet pro-choice sentiments of the American majority will emerge as a political force.
Romney, meanwhile, is feeling the squeeze. His campaign has disputed the charge that the former Massachusetts governor wants to ban abortion in all circumstances, pointing to remarks he’s made that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and maternal health. But Romney is limited in how forcefully he can counter the Obama team’s claims lest he upset the conservative base. It’s the basic problem Romney faces across the board: He must appease absolutists while still appearing reasonable enough for the general election. It’s a balancing act the Republican Party’s standardbearers are going to have to struggle with as long as the party champions ideological purity.
By: Daniel Townsend, The American Prospect, August 2, 2012
“For Women Only”: Five Health Care Mandates Republicans Support
Republicans are in complete upheaval over Obamacare, fired up by the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the law yesterday. They have continuously claimed that the government is ramming this legislation down the throats of the American people, and now they are calling it an unwanted financial burden on everyday Americans. In fact, the individual mandate — the portion of the law that Republicans most vociferously oppose — wouldn’t even affect most Americans.
It might be time for Republicans to take a look back at their own record of health care legislation that they did like — and that forced American people, particularly women, into a lot of things:
Forcing women to get transvaginal ultrasounds: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell wanted to force every woman seeking an abortion to go through the extremely uncomfortable and medically unnecessary procedure of a transvaginal ultrasound — sticking a medical wand far into a woman’s vagina to get a clearer ultrasound image.
Ordering women to cremate and bury their miscarried fetus: A huge abortion omnibus bill in Michigan could force women who miscarry to cremate the miscarried fetuses. This comes at no small expense to the woman: cremation of a fetus costs hundreds of dollars, and interment can be additional thousands. The bill has been passed by the Michigan House, and is awaiting a vote by the Michigan Senate.
Requiring doctors to lie to female patients: In Kansas, Republicans tried to force doctors to tell women that they faced risk of cancer from having an abortion. That is patently untrue, and making doctors say that it was true would be, in effect, requiring them to lie to their patients.
Making a dying woman consult two doctors before she can get a life-saving abortion: The New Hampshire legislature just overrode a veto by the Governor, forcing through a law that bans “partial birth” abortions. The law only reinforces federal law, but has the additional requirement that any woman who is exempt from the abortion ban because her life is at risk must visit not one but two doctors before she can get the procedure to save her life. For many rural women, especially those facing life-threatening conditions, this is near impossible.
Mandating people pay extra to give medical device companies a tax break: Rep. Erik Paulsen (R-MN) worked so hard to protect medical device companies from having to pay, that he has instead passed their costs onto the consumer — regular Americans — by increasing the cost of health coverage.
By: Annie-Rose Strasser, Think Progress, June 29, 2012
“Satisfying The Base”: Why Republicans Can’t Stop Pissing Off Hispanics, Women, And Young People
What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.
It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.
Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll.
The movement of Hispanics into the Democratic camp has been going on for decades. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Replicating California Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s disastrous support almost twenty years ago for Proposition 187 – which would have screened out undocumented immigrants from public schools, health care, and other social services, and required law-enforcement officials to report any “suspected” illegals. (Wilson, you may remember, lost that year’s election, and California’s Republican Party has never recovered.)
The Arizona law now before the Supreme Court – sponsored by Republicans in the state and copied by Republican legislators and governors in several others – would authorize police to stop anyone looking Hispanic and demand proof of citizenship. It’s nativism disguised as law enforcement.
Romney is trying to distance himself from that law, but it’s not working. That may be because he dubbed it a “model law” during February’s Republican primary debate in Arizona, and because its author (former state senator Russell Pearce, who was ousted in a special election last November largely by angry Hispanic voters) says he’s working closely with Romney advisers.
Hispanics are also reacting to Romney’s attack just a few months ago on GOP rival Texas Governor Rick Perry for supporting in-state tuition at the University of Texas for children of undocumented immigrants. And to Romney’s advocacy of what he calls “self-deportation” – making life so difficult for undocumented immigrants and their families that they choose to leave.
As if all this weren’t enough, the GOP has been pushing voter ID laws all over America, whose obvious aim is to intimidate Hispanic voters so they won’t come to the polls. But they may have the opposite effect – emboldening the vast majority of ethnic Hispanics, who are American citizens, to vote in even greater numbers and lend even more support to Obama and other Democrats.
Or consider women – whose political and economic impact in America continues to grow (women are fast becoming better educated than men and the major breadwinners in American homes). The political gender gap is huge. According to recent polls, women prefer Obama to Romney by over 20 percent.
So what is the GOP doing to woo women back? Attacking them. Last February, House Republicans voted to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Last May, they unanimously passed the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” banning the District of Columbia from funding abortions for low-income women. (The original version removed all exceptions – rape, incest, and endangerment to a mother’s life – except “forcible” rape.)
Earlier this year Republican legislators in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Alabama pushed bills requiring women seeking abortions to undergo invasive vaginal ultrasound tests (Pennsylvania Republicans even wanted proof such had viewed the images).
Republican legislators in Georgia and Arizona passed bills banning most abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy. The Georgia bill would also require that any abortion after 20 weeks be done in a way to bring the fetus out alive. Republican legislators in Texas have voted to eliminate funding for any women’s healthcare clinic with an affiliation to an abortion provider – even if the affiliation is merely a shared name, employee, or board member.
All told, over 400 Republican bills are pending in state legislatures, attacking womens’ reproductive rights.
But even this doesn’t seem enough for the GOP. Republicans in Wisconsin just repealed a law designed to prevent employers from discriminating against women.
Or, finally, consider students – a significant and growing electoral force, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Attack them, of course.
Republican Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s budget plan – approved by almost every House Republican and enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney – allows rates on student loans to double on July 1 – from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. That will add an average of $1,000 a year to student debt loads, which already exceed credit-card debt.
House Republicans say America can’t afford the $6 billion a year it would require to keep student loan rates down to where they are now. But that same Republican plan gives wealthy Americans trillions of dollars in tax cuts over the next decade. (Under mounting political pressure, House Republicans have come up with just enough money to keep the loan program going for another year – safely past Election Day – by raiding a fund established for preventive care in the new health-care act.)
Here again, Romney is trying to tiptoe away from the GOP position. He now says he supports keeping student loans where they were. Yet only a few months ago he argued that subsidized student loans were bad because they encouraged colleges to raise their tuition.
How can a political party be so dumb as to piss off Hispanics, women, and young people? Because the core of its base is middle-aged white men – and it doesn’t seem to know how to satisfy its base without at the same time turning off everyone who’s not white, male, and middle-aged.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, April 26, 2012
“Patron Saint For The Far Right”: Robert Bork, Mitt Romney’s Secret Constitutional Weapon
Now that Mitt Romney has ground out a victory against the weakest GOP field in a generation and the most extreme in history, he’s now turning his attention to the general election. To use a particularly vivid metaphor, he’s shaking his Etch-a-Sketch as hard as he can, trying to erase his far-right pandering in the primaries. But despite his head fakes towards moderation, no one should doubt that a President Mitt Romney would enact a dangerously extreme agenda for our country, and nothing makes that clearer than the person he selected as his constitutional and judicial advisor: Robert Bork.
Yes, that Robert Bork.
In a primary dominated by sideshows appealing to the fringe element, important issues like the Supreme Court were rarely discussed in detail, but Romney’s announcement that Bork would be his judicial advisor is the clearest possible signal of how far to the right Romney has moved since his days as a “moderate” Republican in Massachusetts and of his willingness to embrace all the fringiest opinions of all his primary opponents.
Sure, Rick Santorum promised to attack legalized birth control, Ron Paul says the Civil Rights Act “destroyed” privacy, and Newt Gingrich thinks child labor laws are “truly stupid.” But none of them can hold a candle to the extremism of Robert Bork, the patron saint of far-right ideologues. And Bork’s choice in this infamous field? Mitt Romney.
When Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, his nomination was rejected as too extreme by a bipartisan majority in a 58-42 vote. Since then he’s only moved further out of the mainstream.
Robert Bork insists that art and literature aren’t protected by the First Amendment. He defended the constitutionality of poll taxes and literacy tests for voters, and he called the Civil Rights Act “unsurpassed ugliness.” He’s defended state laws that made gay sex a criminal offense. As a judge he routinely ruled in favor of big business over individual Americans.
Perhaps most disturbing are Bork’s reactionary views on how the law treats women. Robert Bork doesn’t just think abortion should be criminalized, he thinks states should be free to outlaw birth control. He’s argued that the Equal Protection Clause doesn’t apply to women. And what seems almost too unbelievable to be real, he even ruled that a company is free to tell female employees to be sterilized or lose their jobs.
In any sane election, Robert Bork would be the hidden crazy uncle or at least denounced as a political liability, but then again this hasn’t been a sane election. Instead, Mitt Romney has bragged about nabbing the endorsement and held Bork up as a model for the judges he’d appoint to the bench, including the Supreme Court. He’s said he wishes Bork were on the court today. Any questions regarding the types of judges Romney would nominate?
With Election Day on the horizon, it’s all but inevitable that Mitt Romney will start reshaping his rhetoric for the general election. But regardless of his carefully calibrated statements or his poll-tested promises, no one should forget that by choosing Robert Bork as a key advisor, Mitt Romney has made crystal clear his frighteningly extreme agenda for America.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For The American Way, The Huffington Post, April 23, 2012
‘”The Indignity Of Mitt”: Romney Says “Dignity Of Work” Only Available To Women In The Paid Workforce
Chris Hayes has turned up the video of a speech made by Mitt Romney in New Hampshire this past January where he spoke of his efforts, while serving as governor of Massachusetts, to force all mothers receiving government aid to get out of the house and into the workforce—or lose their benefits.
It wasn’t about the money. Romney calculates that getting these mothers to leave their kids and enter the workforce would actually cost the state more through the increased costs of providing day care for the children of these working mothers.
No, Romney had a higher goal in mind —he wanted these stay-at-home mothers to know the ‘dignity of work‘.
I know. Was it not Governor Romney who spent this past week exhorting the great dignity and hard work done by moms who elect to stay home and raise their kids? How does that square with his speech which touts his long-held view that certain stay-at-home mothers can only learn the dignity of work by getting out of the house and leaving the daytime care of their children to others?
Speaking to the New Hampshire audience, this is what the Governor had to say:
“I wanted to increase the work requirement,” said Romney. “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’”
I thought that if anything had been established through the eruption caused by CNN pundit Hillary Rosen’s poorly chosen words earlier this week, it was that there is, indeed, immense dignity in the work of stay-at-home moms. So said the President, the First Lady and the one-time First Lady of Massachusetts—Ann Romney.
And, for what it is worth, so say I.
The Governor’s suggestion that there is dignity in the work done by women who stay home to raise their kids (this week’s meme) but, apparently, only when they have sufficient financial resources to do so, completely proves the point Ms. Rosen sought to make—even if her comments were inartfully uttered.
Rosen was not demeaning the importance of full-time parents and everyone knows that. She was, however, pointing out that Mrs. Romney might not have the best perspective when it comes to the difficulties of wanting to be a full-time mother when forced, as a result of financial reality, to enter the workforce.
Where Rosen appears to have gone wrong is in directing her comments toward Mrs. Romney rather than at her husband, the Candidate. I say that because I strongly suspect that Ann Romney ‘gets it’. I strongly suspect that Mrs. Romney does understand the difficulties faced by many women who want to commit themselves to raising their kids but need to earn a living to put a roof over the kids’ heads.
It’s Ann Romney’s husband who appears to not have a solid grip on what he believes in this regard, or is—yet again—simply changing his pitch to fit what he believes to be the winning narrative of the day.
If you believe that women whose families do not earn enough to support their families without government assistance should enter the workforce, that’s fine. And if you believe that women who choose to stay home and be a full-time mother is certainly a difficult and meaningful job—that’s fine too.
If you further believe, as most sensible people do, that being a full time mother is a noble and hugely worthwhile profession that can be disrupted when circumstances require that mom go to work to pay the bills, then welcome to the real world.
None of these options are the point.
The point is that Governor Romney’s desire to have it both ways on virtually any topic appears to be endless. He simply cannot tout the notion that a woman staying home to raise her children is the work equivalent of going to the office each day (which it certainly is) and then, out of the other side of his mouth, argue that stay-at-home moms with small children must get into the workforce as the only means of experiencing the ‘dignity of work.’
Mrs. Romney has it right on this issue. The experience of women who commit their lives to raising their families most certainly know the dignity of hard work. It is her husband who has it wrong. Unfortunately, it is Mrs. Romney’s husband who would like to be President of the United States.
Maybe we should waste this week in the campaign by asking Governor Romney to explain his contradictory perspectives?
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, The Policy Page, Forbes, April 15, 2012
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