step by step, heart to heart
Earlier this week I discussed how the Democrats’ accusation that the Republican Party was waging a “War on Women” was a disingenuous attempt to shore up support among a critical constituency that had abandoned them in droves in the 2010 election. As noted, the GOP erased a 10 point gender gap, no small feat considering the history of that gap.
Yesterday Hilary Rosen spoke on Anderson Cooper on this exact topic. The headlines about her comments all focus on her personal arrogance and denigration of Ann Romney, which I will get to in short order, but I wanted first to discuss what else she said. It was rather interesting. From the transcript:
HILARY ROSEN: Well, first, can we just get rid of this word, “war on women”? The Obama campaign does not use it, President Obama does not use it—this is something that the Republicans are accusing people of using, but they’re actually the ones spreading it.
My mouth dropped when I saw the video (which you can view here). We have been hearing from Democrats and their political operatives for over two months about the “GOP’s War on Women.” It’s been seeded into the narrative with carefully calculated uproars over Komen v Planned Parenthood, the contraception contrivance, and scary transvaginal ultrasound laws. MoveOn has a sub-domain dedicated to it, and EMILY’S List went all-in on a whole website. I guess they didn’t get the memo. Because now Team Obama is disowning it? What? Did the they take a look at those polls and find they weren’t nearly as clear cut–or enough–as they’d hoped? Something changed, because this is a major shift. And it’s cute how she tries to blame the GOP there at the end. Typical Bush-style projection politics.
Now, back to Ann Romney, because she’s the latest target in what I’m calling the real war on women. Let me be very specific here: Obama’s history is riddled with the political bones of women who got in the way. He always looks for the weakest link, and it’s usually a woman or, more rarely, another minority. He targets them and destroys them through well-timed leaks of sensitive information, or by stoking the inherent sexism of a male-dominated press, or the ginned-up ire of partisan women, and then he leaves their political carcass in his wake. If you want the truth, or specific names, you’ll have to go back through the archives because this has been well-documented by various bloggers and a few journalists, and I’m not about to rehash the whole thing, especially when I’ve got two prime examples of which most people are aware just sitting on the shelf: Hillary Clinton & Sarah Palin.
Palinization–the targeting of a conservative female politician and attacking her in every sexist way imaginable, always through a complicit proxy-press and a fearsome social media/blogging noise machine–is a tactic that was developed, perfected, and deployed from Democratic headquarters. If you were wondering when this was going to start up again now that the 2012 campaign has arrived at our doorstep, you’re late to the party. It already started. Rosen’s comments about Ann Romney are just the latest example of an orchestrated attack on Ann Romney’s character and femininity. Speaking of which, here are those comments:
What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, “Well, my wife tells me what women really care about are economic issues.” And, “When I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.” Guess what? His wife has never actually worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing—in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and how do—why we worry about their future.
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