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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by 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,
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
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
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
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.
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Drafted into the Mommy Wars | Politics
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