STORY #1: The war for women
Amazing how quick former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) is to take up challenges from President Obama. This week, the challenge was to prove that he can be a good candidate for female voters. After all, the Obama camp charged, is Romney not from the party that opposes legislation making it easier for women to sue for wage discrimination, and has engaged in ridiculous attacks on their reproductive decisions? Romney’s response: 92 percent of jobs lost on Obama’s watch were held by women!
What Romney neglected to mention is that a) the unemployment rate for men is still 0.2 percentage points higher than the one for women, and that b) male-dominated sectors like construction were more heavily represented in the earlier years of the recession, which is a typical pattern, while female-dominated sectors like education are more represented now. Does anyone but him see the recession any other way?
STORY #2: The war between women
Good God, I hope we’re not about to get into this “Mommy Wars” bullshit again. That appears to be the result of Ann Romney’s introduction to Twitter. Democratic commentator Hilary Rosen said yesterday on CNN that, because Ann has “never worked a day in her life,” she can’t be in touch with economic struggles faced by women. Ann shot back by pointing out that raising five boys is work. (But five Romney boys? What did they do, eat sugar? Get a B?)
That it is, so Ann wins that part of the argument. But her inattention to Rosen’s point about socioeconomic status, which bars many women from even thinking about staying home with their children, only makes Rosen look right. The ability to respect other women’s choices in full requires the ability to understand why they were able to make them, which Rosen has in greater numbers. But why Rosen brought a candidate’s wife into a political chat is a mystery.
STORY #3: The war on boys’ clubs
Demands for 50 percent of everything in terms of gender parity sound just as disingenuous coming from smirking right-wing commentators as they do from raging feminists. That seems to be the only thing that will satisfy this wrtier from The Blaze, a fairly new conservative site, on the “boys’ club” mentality and salary disparity in the Obama White House. Does anyone outside the business world ever factor in the role of salary expectations when measuring men’s to women’s salaries? Until they do, I’m not going to bother worrying about it. I’m happy with my salary.
I see two insights which are both 100% true. One is that motherhood is far too important a job to be belittled. Period.
The other is that Ann Romney is demonstrably out of touch with the concerns of rank-and-file American workers, male or female. She has lived a cloistered life. Since this is pretty obvious, there’s no need for ham-fisted PR hacks like hillary Rosen to clumsily point it out.
Here in Massachusetts, she once told a reporter that times were so tough for her and Mitt during college that they had to consider selling some of their portfolio. Tiiiiiimes is hard. (Not certain that’s a true story, BTW, but pretty sure.) If critics remain quiet and let Ann Romney talk, blue collar people will get the message that “hey, it’s almost like the Romneys don’t live in the same America I live in.” They’ll get this message all by themselves.
When PR flacks point this out and analyze her, it seems like an attack. On a spouse. That shifts the subject AWAY from what they’re trying to call attention to… . Instead, what you do if find the clips and let people share them on facebook and youtube, and reach the obvious conclusion.
Absolutely correct, and even if Rosen isn’t working directly with the Obama campaign, she’s probably going to be offered far fewer gigs than she would have if she’d handled the question better. Ann is completely owning this conversation.