I don’t think too many women liked what they heard from Mitt Romney last night. Everyone is laughing about his “binders full of women” line, but that was just one piece of a very disturbing performance. It’s nice that he had a woman as chief of staff but being chief of staff to a governor is not the kind of job where you get to leave at 4 o’clock so you can get home to cook your kids’ dinner. That’s just not plausible. That’s not what flex-time is about. There are women all throughout our workforce who are working long hours and flex-time helps them juggle their family obligations with their job requirements. It’s helps men do this, too. But a decent chief of staff works harder and longer hours than the executive that they serve. You don’t send her home early to feed the kids. Either the story is just made up, it’s grossly exaggerated, or Romney was a lousy governor who quit working mid-afternoon. Come to think of it, that may be why he didn’t even try to get reelected.
It wasn’t much better when Romney answered a question about the status of the Assault Weapons Ban by saying that he doesn’t support any new laws but that gun violence would drop if women stopped having babies out of wedlock. “Guns don’t kill people, single mothers kill people.”
Romney wouldn’t say that he supported equal pay for women. He lied about his record on contraception. He lied about asking for the binders of women. He still wants to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. He still supports overturning Roe v. Wade.
I just don’t think women felt like Romney understands or respects them.
I mean, I get your point but…does anyone feel like that?
My gut reaction to the binder story was that it was disrespectful and clueless. When I went on to Facebook to Like the “Binders of Women” site shortly after the debate, I saw that most of my nonpolitical highschool girlfriends – in Ohio – had already fav’d it.
Add to the mix the disrespect to Candy Crawley, and last night was a disaster for Romney in terms of women persuadables.
the Romney campaign is shooting themselves in the foot by going after her today, it completely reinforces Romney’s disrespectful performance last night.
I remember Romney charging her when she shut him off and Obama coming over to rescue her. He checked himself when Obama got near. Didn’t anyone else see that? At the time I just thought that he was out of control and disrespecting the moderator, but now I see it was the WOMAN that defied him that enraged him. I think Obama’s action was instinctive, but it was also the perfect political contrast. Hey, you don’t get physical with the woman, OK?
I didn’t see it that way at the time, but that is an interesting take. I do remember thinking in that moment that Obama was about to put the smack down on Romney – just from looking at their actions, I thought “Oh shit, he’s about to give Romney a I am the PRESIDENT OF THESE MUTHA F*CKING STATES and YOU WILL RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH!.” And he did, just not verbally.
I am the PRESIDENT OF THESE MUTHA F*CKING STATES and YOU WILL RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH!.”
hee hee hee
love this
when was this? [I missed part of the debate]. btw I think Obama’s command of the space – while respecting Candy C, was first rate
Sadly, I watched the debate live instead of recording it or I could pinpoint the spot. Maybe ejmw can help. I just remember her trying to shut Romney up and he hurried over looking real mad and I wondered if he was going to hit her.
Hmm…the part I was thinking of was the Benghazi part, but re-watching it, I’m not sure that’s the same part you were thinking of. Check out this video starting about 1:14:30 – is that it, or was it something else?
I’ll never understand any woman that votes for any gooper anymore. The whole party is twisted.
Well .. there are women like Malkin and Coulter .. but I think you mean non-insane ones.
CROWLEY: Governor Romney, pay equity for women?
Don’t forget, also, that he never asked for the binders. A woman’s group brought them voluntarily.
http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2012/10/17/binders-full-women-mitt-romney-claim-not-enti
rely-accurate/jrKRRGSIPqjvuKX8dgq6gL/story.html
Consider how Romney was raised. A strong patriarch for a father, a Mormon society where women are second-class citizens, enough wealth to allow his wife to stay home and raise their children. As in so many other aspects of his life, Romney is completely out of touch with what this country is like, and how women in average society work.
It’s very telling to me when Romney was addressing the role of women in the debate. He was very awkward and ill at ease because he doesn’t consider women his peers. They work for him, not with him. His “binders of women” sounded stupid as soon as he said it beccause it’s offensive and objectifying. To think he can classify women as a stack of resumes is ridiculous.
And the unwed mother crap with gun control was simply gibberish. Not one sentence of that rant made a bit of sense.
Romney: out of touch with just about everyone.
I don’t remember his exact words about unwed mothers but it seemed he was blaming them for having kids without getting married. While it’s true that there are unwed women getting pregnant by artificial insemination, mostly Lesbian women that want a baby but don’t want sex with a man, in 99.8% of cases of pregnancy there’s a GUY equally responsible. Where’s the harsh words for them?
I assume your question is rhetorical. You know the Neanderthal Party’s position on pregnancy: Birth Control is the responsibility of both people. It’s the woman’s responsibility to take the pill, and the man’s responsibility to skip town if she doesn’t and gets knocked up.
You assume correctly. And to your succinct description I would add, “It’s the cheap __’s fault in the first place for tempting me.” Remarkably like the Taliban whipping women for exposing their wrists to inflame men’s lusts. Wrists!
Mitt’s favorite brand of binder? Trapper Keeper (trap her, keep her).
I know you’re talking smack, but I think we’ll need more empirical polling evidence before we can decide whether Romney did badly with the relatively small universe of undecided but persuadable women who may ultimately determine the outcome of this election.
True, but something is up. Romney’s team is in a panic to address the concerns of women. They’ve released a hastily put-together video of women he worked with in the past praising him and are having their spokespeople walk back statements like he didn’t support lily ledbetter. He’s even released tweets about how he respects women.
I’m sure that Romney’s guys, like Obama’s, have focus groups that tell them how people reacted. And given that Romney’s team spent today focused on reassuring women is the first strong evidence that he really blew it last night.
Oh, one of their first walkback attempts was to try to change the topic on the “binder” discussion to be about Obama’s “empty binder” of plans for the next 4 years. And I see that they managed to get their wingnut friends at AP to put that out as a story and promote it heavily.
But while this shit worked when Rove and Drudge owned the media, no more. In 2004 Rove easily got the media to shutup about Bush’s lying denial of not caring about bin Laden and instead to pretend that Kerry had offended Cheney’s daughter. Back in 2004 I bet that Romney’s team could have changed the topic this way. But no, “binder” means “binder of woman”, no matter how many drudge-style stories AP releases.
I’ve been wondering about why things changed and am beginning to think that social media may actually have been the prime cause. Back in 2004 the communication was still primarily top-down – no, we wanted to believe that blogs could make a difference, but back then they only did if the large media sources picked them up. Now large parts of the media monitor the social media and report what people are talking about.
Gee. Maybe they need to release Ann, their “secret weapon” since she has such a keen understanding of what it’s like to be an average gal in America.
They’ve kept her under wraps lately since she said in an interview that her primary concern, should Mitt he win, would be for his “mental well-being.” Prescient, that Ann. Now we all understand what she meant by that.
He’s even released tweets about how he respects women.
Great. We can add that to Mitt’s other “like” quotes:
“I like cars. I like American cars.”
“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”
“I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.”
“I love this state. The trees are the right height.”
“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”
“I’m learning to say “y’all” and I like grits and strange things are happening to me.”
“I like coal. I’m going to make sure we’re going to be able to burn clean coal.”
“I like PBS. I like Big Bird–I actually like you, too.”
“No, no, I like mandates. The mandates work.”
“I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes.”
To this we can add: “I like women.”
Women must be thrilled.
The premise “if we are going to have women in the workforce…” that introduced the other stuff might be the basis for all the other contortions.
yes, “if”??? this was mentioned on several kos threads about it and it generated outrage on Facebook –
note: the Romneys have only sons. That’s also a factor
I’m sure it’s exaggerated, but I’ve also never gotten the impression that being governor requires you to burn the midnight oil for those many months the state legislature isn’t in session. It’s a totally different game than D.C.
I have a theory about why the Romney debate bounce was so huge – basically unprecedented in size. And if that is correct we can expect at least 60% of that to bounce back over the next week.
And yes, it is directly related to women.
Per Stan Greenberg, highly respected Democratic opinion expert, Romney surged with women, especially with the “unmarried women” voting segment, after the first debate. That, plus the surge in GOP enthusiasm, were the prime drivers of his debate bounce. Many other pollsters have made similar observations.
My theory is that the post-debate poll surge was driven by two primary actors: 1) shift of women toward Romney, and 2) increased enthusiasm of the GOP base.
(2) was inevitable and it’s not going to go away. The wingnuts in my community are frankly ready to go to war against Obama and at this point Romney could promise to confiscate all guns and they would ignore that, figure it was just a lying campaign promise, and get even madder about Obama.
But (1) was not. However, I think what we’re seeing here is the first Facebook election. It’s not just facebook of course, but that’s the major social media site.
Social media is an interesting thing. People “friend” people from all aspects of their lives and see what they post – it’s a fun way to learn about stuff you’d never hear about othersise. Today women who are not political and who ignored the debate are reading a flood of posts from their political “friends” about Romney’s many, many anti-female gaffes. I’m sure this happened the other way two weeks ago. More than political advertising, which so many of us completely tune out now, this has major influence. And if the issue your “friends” are posting about is a hot button for you, you’ll click and learn more.
I think that two week ago the “unmarried women” segment (and a few other related segments that weren’t named by Greenberg) had heard a lot of bad stuff about Romney but were then told via their “friends” that a) Romney actually seemed decent in the debate and b) Obama didn’t address any of their concerns.
Moreover, Obama’s support from the middle is fragile. As I keep trying to point out to Obama devotees, his first term track record on the economy doesn’t impress anyone but those devoted followers – in large part because he didn’t set the expectations of a slow recovery but instead observed “green shoots” in mid-2009 and acted like the stimulus was going to solve the economy by itself. The middle people ARE willing to give someone else a try, which is Obama’s weakest point right now.
So, Romney came across well, Obama was so-so, and people who are willing to give an alternative a try signed up. But, like all those GOP primary shooting stars who rocketed to rapid popularity then dived to spectacular crashes after people learned a bit about them, Romney may also be another GOP temporary shooting star now that people have seen him in more depth.
It’s really hard to beat a facebook campaign against you if it include links to videos of you actually saying the offensive stuff. A lot of these people heard about Romney’s poor treatment of animals and people earlier in the year, but those memories tend to fade. This round of videos, I believe, will stick through election day.
Thanks for this analysis. I had been very puzzled by the Romney surge among women after the first debate, given how anti-woman the Repubs are, and Romney’s unwillingness to distance himself from those positions, but it makes sense if a big chunk of low-involvement women had their first real exposure to him as a result of the memes sweeping the country after the first debate — not only the one of Obama’s lack of pushback, but also that of Romney’s apparent moderation.
There is an equivalence yarn out there today that women were turned off to both men for being too aggressive. I didn’t see it that way at all (full disclosure: i am male).
I saw a bully trying to throw his weight around, and a guy reckoning with the asshole who’s been calling him a failure all year, on television, for the entire world to see.
One jerk, and one justifiably very pissed off person.
I saw CNN doing the same thing yesterday, although nobody mentioned a perspective exclusive to women that I caught at the time.
Even the international edition was pushing the debate as some unseemly fistfight. I don’t watch often enough to know the personalities by name, but some tall thin guy with a British accent interviewed several people in a row remote from the US, and he must have used the word “nasty” more than a dozen times in the space of the ten minutes or so he spent asking questions and talking to them. When I hear exact terms and phrases repeated like that, I can’t help but assume that a meme is being deliberately spread.
Gosh, I can’t think of a thing to add, except that Candy should have punched him in the nose before he ran out of the building.
She could have yelled “Let’s get him girls!” and shown him a thing or two.
You may say I’m a dreamer….
Candy evened the score with her fact check. And like most bullies, Mitt couldn’t handle the hit.
TPM reporting slightly less people watched the 2nd debate than the first, but still a lot of people watched the debate which is nothing but good news for Obama.
“65.6 Million Watched Second Debate, Slightly Less Than First”
http://t.co/AowXmyZI
If Mitt Romney’s tall tale actually happened as he claims it did, then isn’t he guilty of Sexual Discrimination… against men?
If, as he put it, “there weren’t enough qualified women, so we had to go find some” and they effectively chose to hire based more on gender then on qualifications, then that is a blatant violation of Massachusetts’ Equal Opportunity Employment laws which state that “it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religious creed, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, military service, age, ancestry, or disability.”