A Letter to Women Voters
Robyn Blumner

An open letter to women voters:

Ladies, I write to you because this is our election. Both President Barack Obama and his challenger Mitt Romney desperately need us to win, which means it is up to us to determine the path of this nation. To me, it comes down to whether we want a country where Americans have each other's backs, or where we are on our own with a tattered safety net. But there is another central question in this campaign and that is one of trust.

Just as with every other relationship in our lives -- husbands, partners, friends, co-workers -- trust is an essential element. Trusting those around us gives us confidence that we have a firm grasp on the world we inhabit. So, too, in our leaders. If we can't trust them, we won't know what world they'll build. It is this test that Mitt Romney has failed.

Like an overeager suitor, Romney morphs into whatever is desired at the moment. No doubt you've known a guy who claims to be into you when he wants something. Romney is that guy. He's proved it over his entire political career, as a liberal when challenging Sen. Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts, as "severely conservative" in the Republican primaries and now as the Etch-a-Sketch moderate whose warmongering over Iran and Syria was so inverted during Monday's debate that I thought a warbling Mitt might break into John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance."

Romney's the guy who tells us to pay no attention to that little misunderstanding in the hidden video when he wrote off 47 percent of Americans as moochers. He cares about us all! Meanwhile, he's sending coded love notes to his fellow .1 percenters with promises of slashed environmental regulations, workers' rights and safety net programs, and, the sweetest whispers of all, more tax cuts on top of the Bush tax cuts that subversively supplant any real concern over deficits and debt.

But you have to hand it to Romney, this Dale Carnegie of candidates -- he really knows how to lean in and pretend to care.

He says he's the guy in the race who cares the most about American workers and increases in take-home pay. Of course, it's not what one says that reveals true character and intent; it's what one does.

Romney's concern for the American worker is best illustrated by Bain Capital, where workers and their benefits at companies Bain took over were the expendable fat to be cut away so Bain could "harvest ... significant profits."

Romney's claim to care more than Obama about small business is just as empty. When Bain dumped take-over companies into bankruptcy court (after extracting millions from them in fees and distributions), it left behind hundreds of small businesses with nearly worthless I.O.U.s, representing the goods and services that those small businesses provided in good faith. Feelin' the love?

Ladies, Romney says he will be the better candidate for women by making the economic case, promising a nirvana-like world where 20 percent tax cuts and higher defense spending magically erase the deficit and add millions of jobs. But as he fills our heads with fantasy numbers, he deflects us from his real women's agenda, one in which Planned Parenthood is defunded, employers get to decide on access to contraception in health plans and Robert Bork, the man whose notoriously retrograde legal mind rejects the right to privacy, advises on judicial appointments.

Good-bye Roe v. Wade, church-state separation and the little guy's chances against corporate power. Hey, corporations are people, too, remember?

America's plutocrats have spent a fortune to get Romney elected, with some threatening their employees with layoffs if they don't vote for him. (See Koch Industries.) The top .1 percent know Romney is one of them. They trust a guy who stashes wealth overseas and they're the only ones who should. No matter what shape he has shifted into to appeal to workers, the middle class and to women, especially women, the plutocrats know it's just a first-date act.

After the romance is over, Romney will be all theirs.

 

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A Letter to Women Voters | Politics

 

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