After watching last night’s debate I’m starting to think that the only woman Mitt Romney knows is Ann Romney – and even that’s debatable.
Let’s start with the Binders Full of Women exchange. Let’s look at what Romney said:
CROWLEY: Governor Romney, pay equity for women?
ROMNEY: Thank you. And important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.
And I — and I went to my staff, and I said, “How come all the people for these jobs are — are all men.” They said, “Well, these are the people that have the qualifications.” And I said, “Well, gosh, can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?”
When Romney started down this path my first thought was, “Well gosh, how does this guy not know any qualified women?” Notice also how he asks his staff, “can’t we find some?” It’s as if he’s saying… Where would we find such creatures in the wild? What is their natural habitat?
ROMNEY: And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.
I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women.
Hey, Mitt found women in binders! But even this “story” appears to be false.
Not a true story.
What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.
They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.
I have written about this before, in various contexts; tonight I’ve checked with several people directly involved in the MassGAP effort who confirm that this history as I’ve just presented it is correct — and that Romney’s claim tonight, that he asked for such a study, is false.
I’m expecting the binder story to have legs, mainly because lying to make yourself look better is something everyone has encountered in their life – also, social media has exploded over this comment. We all know that guy/gal who constantly spins every event to their advantage; facts be damned as long as they look awesome. If Mitt was looking for a way to make voters relate to him on a human level, he may have found it because we all know that guy.
I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.
Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. But number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school.
She said, I can’t be here until 7 or 8 o’clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o’clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.
Here’s the thing, I’m all for flex time, but Romney’s wording of this point makes me wonder what decade he’s living in. First, it’s not just mothers who need flex time, but the example Romney chose was quite limiting. Men who are fathers or not, and single women, need flex time, too. The leaving work to go home and make dinner comment hit a nerve. I’m not saying that it isn’t true in some cases, but this example came across as dated. It placed female employees in a Mad Men box. Women cook dinner. Women take care of children.
I know plenty of families/couples where the man cooks and takes care of children. But it seems those families don’t exist in Mitt’s pink and blue world.
We’re going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I’m going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women. In the — in the last women have lost 580,000 jobs. That’s the net of what’s happened in the last four years. We’re still down 580,000 jobs. I mentioned 31/2 million women, more now in poverty than four years ago.
What we can do to help young women and women of all ages is to have a strong economy, so strong that employers that are looking to find good employees and bringing them into their workforce and adapting to a flexible work schedule that gives women opportunities that they would otherwise not be able to afford.
This is what I have done. It’s what I look forward to doing and I know what it takes to make an economy work, and I know what a working economy looks like. And an economy with 7.8 percent unemployment is not a real strong economy. An economy that has 23 million people looking for work is not a strong economy.
An economy with 50 percent of kids graduating from college that can’t finds a job, or a college level job, that’s not what we have to have.
I keep going back and rereading this answer because I can’t find where Romney answers the question: Governor Romney, pay equity for women?
And what about Romney’s comment on contraception? Here’s what he said last night:
Romney later fired back, saying, “I don’t believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care or not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives.”
In the past, Romney has expressed support for the Blunt Amendment, a measure that would allow employers to refuse to cover healthcare benefits that violate their religious beliefs.
That’s quite a flip flop, or in plain language… a lie. The contraception/abortion issue is a big problem for Republicans. They still don’t understand that these are economic issues to women and the men who love them. Mitt Romney has decided to lie about his position. A big part of what we saw last night was Romney’s lies coming home to roost. And after last night Romney needs to build a bigger hen house.
Also, I’m having trouble believing that a question on abortion/contraception wasn’t asked last night. Seriously? This has been a huge issue for months and months. Surely, the question was submitted? And while Obama spun one of his answers onto the topic (thank god!) the fact that a question on women’s reproductive rights wasn’t asked boggles my mind.
And when it came to limiting assault weapons, well… guns don’t kill people, single parents do.
CROWLEY: Governor Romney, the question is about assault weapons, AK-47s.
ROMNEY: Yeah, I’m not in favor of new pieces of legislation on — on guns and taking guns away or making certain guns illegal. We, of course, don’t want to have automatic weapons, and that’s already illegal in this country to have automatic weapons. What I believe is we have to do, as the president mentioned towards the end of his remarks there, which is to make enormous efforts to enforce the gun laws that we have, and to change the culture of violence that we have.
And you ask how — how are we going to do that? And there are a number of things. He mentioned good schools. I totally agree. We were able to drive our schools to be number one in the nation in my state. And I believe if we do a better job in education, we’ll — we’ll give people the — the hope and opportunity they deserve and perhaps less violence from that. But let me mention another thing. And that is parents. We need moms and dads, helping to raise kids. Wherever possible the — the benefit of having two parents in the home, and that’s not always possible. A lot of great single moms, single dads. But gosh to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone, that’s a great idea.
First, may I point out that Mitt Romney was on stage last night with a man raised by a single parent. Second, did Mitt Romney just blame assault weapons on single parents? This is another major disconnect. Wanna stop gun violence? Get married!
Mitt Romney is a man out of time. He’s very good at stereotyping people he’s never met. And even though this didn’t come up last night, consider his comments on health care:
50 million Americans have no health insurance. Does government have an obligation to help them? The answer is no, Mitt Romney suggested during a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on Sunday, in part because people can already get care through emergency rooms:
“We do provide care for people who don’t have insurance, people — we — if someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care.”
The “apartment” distinction is a tell. In Mitt’s world people without health insurance live in apartments – they are not homeowners, and they are probably urban. In Mitt’s world women can be found in binders. In Mitt’s world women need flex time so they can go home and cook dinner and watch the kids. In Mitt’s world paying for contraception every month isn’t an economic issue – like say, a phone or electric bill. In Mitt’s world gun violence can be fixed by marriage.
I don’t want to live in Mitt Romney’s world.