Drafted into the Mommy Wars
Clarence Page

Oops! Just as President Barack Obama's campaign was enjoying a big favorability advantage with women, a prominent female ally tripped over an old unwritten rule: Lay off your opponent's kinfolk.

Team Obama rushed out like a bucket brigade to put out the fires after an on-air gaffe by Hillary Rosen, a Democratic strategist, CNN commentator and friend to many in the Obama White House. Or, at least, they were friends before she said on CNN that Ann Romney should not be advising her husband on women's economic concerns since she'd never "worked a day in her life."

Rosen apparently forgot that a more correct description, politically and factually, for the stay-at-home mother of five children would be "worked outside of her home."

As the backlash hit the fan, Rosen apologized profusely in print and on CNN. And Ann Romney demonstrated her own effectiveness as an asset to the Romney campaign by responding with grace, wit and intelligence. "I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys," she tweeted. "Believe me, it was hard work."

Indeed. For supporters of Romney, suffering a double-digit deficit with women in the latest polls, Rosen's comment was low-hanging fruit -- which Team Obama counterattacked like locusts.

Yet Democrats suddenly found themselves on the defensive on a topic they have owned for weeks as they attacked a Republican "war against women." Republicans now came back, charging a war by Obama against moms.

Rosen is not an adviser to President Obama, his campaign or the Democratic National Committee. But the Romney campaign was not about to let those inconvenient facts get in the way of a good attack campaign.

Romney surrogates and other supporters used Rosen's remark as evidence that Obama doesn't understand women or value mothers.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) claimed there was "clearly a connection between Rosen and the Obama administration" for many years, reporting that Rosen, an unaligned Democratic strategist, had "visited the White House 35 times." White House press secretary Jay Carney later confirmed that Hilary Rosen has visited the White House "on a number of occasions for large events, large meetings having to do with communications, things like that." But a visit doesn't mean that she met with or advised the president.

Nevertheless, Romney's supporters were eager to tie Rosen to Obama, whose people were just as eager to pretend they never heard of Rosen. Obama's top advisors immediately condemned her remarks as "offensive and inappropriate."

First Lady Michelle Obama weighed in with a tweet: "Every mother works hard, and every woman deserves to be respected."

Rosen's one-liner, by contrast, pinched the same mommy-war nerve that Hillary Rodham Clinton sparked in her remark during the 1992 campaign that instead of working as a lawyer, she "could have stayed home and baked cookies." Them's fightin' words --and not just in Sarah Palin Land.

It is always hazardous to talk about an opponent's relatives, Rosen surely knows, unless the opponent has made them an issue. Romney did that when he began to refer to his wife, whose ease with crowds makes up for many of her husband's weaknesses, as his advisor on women's concerns.

Rosen's point, which she unfortunately stepped on, was a valid one to make. Ann Romney undoubtedly worked hard at being a mother, and her children appear to be excellent examples of her wise parenting. However, her experience is far from typical of the pressures most mothers face, whether they work outside the home or not.

The issues of women's health, equal pay, education, day care and other concerns that have won favorable support for Democrats call for a better connection by Mitt Romney to the concerns of women who don't have "two Cadillacs," as Mitt once reported about his own wife.

Most American women don't have the choices that Ann Romney could make in deciding whether to work outside of her home or stay home with her kids. That's not a knock on her. It's a description of the challenges that her husband and President Obama face in connecting with the lives and problems of American women. They make up more than half of the electorate. They need to be heard.