Mitt, Women, Binders And AK47s

Filed in National by on October 17, 2012

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.

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A stay-at-home mom with an obsession for National politics.

Comments (33)

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  1. Jason330 says:

    I guess Mitt Romney kinda sorta has a point about families, but I don’t know a single Republican who has any credibility to talk about single parents when they belong to a party that is so committed to opposing family planning.

  2. pandora says:

    True, Jason. Republicans are committed to making more single parents.

  3. cassandra_m says:

    You can look at much of what you’ve pointed out here as pointers to whether or not he believes in that 47% BS. A man who is so distant from the way that majorities of Americans live their lives that he can actually afford to live by his stereotypes AND use those stereotypes to attempt a policy discussion has no business claiming to care about 100% of Americans.

    And I was STUNNED that Romney opened the door on that at the end. Saying twice that he cared about 100% of Americans just invited President Obama to remind people that Romney tells his funders that huge swaths of Americans can be written off.

  4. Steve Newton says:

    @cassandra I don’t think Romney opened that door for Obama vis a vis the 47%. I think Obama was going there all the time, but that once he knew he got to speak last he wasn’t going there till then. That way the last thing in the debate you heard was Obama defining the 47% of the population Romney wants to leave behind, and Romney having no chance to spin it back. I don’t think that was improvised, I think that was strategy from word “go.”

    Romney’s gaffe leading into it (with his chin) was icing on the Dem cake, but Obama was going there at that moment no matter what.

  5. cassandra_m says:

    Leading with your chin = opening the door. Obama may certainly have been going there (it was his only chance), but Romney opening that door let Obama respond as a reminder — not an attack.

  6. pandora says:

    I’m not so sure, Steve. Maybe it was a tentative plan – but that plan could have been derailed by Romney tackling the 47% comments earlier in the debate. If he had apologized for the comments it would have been tricky for Obama to go after it because it could have been viewed as piling on.

  7. Another Mike says:

    I agree with Steve that the president was going to use the 47% comment when he knew Romney could not answer, but Romney set it up like a golf ball on a tee.

    As far as the “binders full of women,” I was surprised that a guy who had made a career of running companies had to ask his staff where all the female applicants were. Didn’t he come across any women in all his years in private business who would have been qualified for his cabinet? And isn’t asking for candidates based on gender some sort of affirmative action, which I’m fairly certain the GOP is against? (Except for Romney, who’s never really for or against anything.)

    I thought the same thing as Pandora when Romney turned the automatic weapons issue to two-parent households. He wasn’t 10 feet from a guy raised by a single mother. Half of marriages end in divorce. Kids have babies, and those babies are raised much of the time by single parents. Did Romney really imply that single parents raise children more prone to gun violence? Maybe he meant that parents are an important part of keeping their children from turning to violence — with Mitt you never really know — but it certainly did not come across that way.

  8. anon says:

    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.

    Fuck you, Mitt. You had all of those kids and never needed time off of work for any kid related things? Then you fucking suck as a father and as a husband. We’re not sea turtles we’re human beings, we don’t fertilize and walk away, asshole.

  9. jason330 says:

    “binders full of women,” story as told by Romney is not only stupid – but also…not true.

    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.

    Shocking right?

  10. heragain says:

    Someone in my twitter pointed out that all the big shooting incidents have been committed by men from 2 parent families. Ow.

  11. pandora says:

    Well, well, well, heragain. Whatdaya know. I’ll be pointing that out often.

  12. Paula says:

    Pandora, great post. You succinctly summed up my post-debate conversation with my mom. Romney has led such an insular life, he can’t even imagine a person like me. And I can’t imagine living in his world either. I think most people long ago (like, in the 60s) recognized that this picture of a two-parent, stay-at-home-mom family is an idealized view and not reality. He seems to think anything else is an aberration that should be fixed. I fear being abandoned in a Romney-Ryan world.

  13. Linda says:

    I found this a little disturbing when Romney said this about his tax plan that rates come down and the burden also comes down on you for one more reason, and that is every middle-income taxpayer no longer will pay any tax on interest, dividends. No tax on your savings. That makes life a lot easier. Easier for who? People in his world, because even in a good economy most people in my world ever worried about that issue. Right now people don’t want to hear about interest on dividends or savings. Heck, they just want a house, a job, education for their kids, and healthcare and this douchebag is telling me he is doing me a favor!

  14. jason330 says:

    If Romney actually said that middle class people will enjoy a tax break by not having to pay taxes on savings account interest – that is just f*cking hilarious.

  15. V says:

    Heragain: you confirmed my suspicion, when he started that I thought of the columbine parents and Jared Loughner’s parents.

    I mean I get that when there’s one parent who’s working their ass off to support the family, they may not be around to supervise and their kids could get into trouble. The solution for that problem is to GIVE THOSE PARENTS RESOURCES, not tell them to get married. I was sorta surprised Obama didn’t go there, and get personally offended.

    Also, even before the binders thing turned out to be untrue to me it REEKED of Tokenism.

  16. reis says:

    If Mitt puts you in a binder, does that mean all your ancestors go to heaven?

  17. X Stryker says:

    Mitt’s answer to gun violence is telling people they should get married. Obviously his strategy on the environment will be telling people to recycle. And his health care plan is telling people to eat vegetables.

  18. X Stryker says:

    His solution for education: telling kids to study. For unemployment: telling businesses to hire people. The Middle East: telling Hamas to renounce violence.

  19. X Stryker says:

    Almost forgot immigration: telling illegal immigrants to leave.

  20. Jason330 says:

    X – those summaries hold up pretty well.

  21. Jason330 says:

    His solution for capital markets indulging in wild west style gambling: telling banks to self regulate.

  22. pandora says:

    Another thing that strikes me about Romney’s “binders” comment is the fact that he said he became aware of this “woman” problem when he became governor… wasn’t he in his 50s?

  23. jenl says:

    Did I really hear him say “so they can go home and cook dinner”?

    Also, when it comes to job creation Romney’s continual reference to his 25 year private sector record drives me crazy. He has no idea how jobs are created. He knows how to make money. Often by eliminating jobs.

    Finally, I might have missed it but one thing I think the President left on the table was Romney’s abysmal job creation record when he was Governor of MA. Wasn’t MA 47th in job creation? With this record how can he claim that he knows how government can help create jobs?

  24. Liberal Elite says:

    @h “Someone in my twitter pointed out that all the big shooting incidents have been committed by men from 2 parent families. Ow.”

    It’s not just the big shooting incidents.

    Over 90% of all gun deaths in the US are family and friends.

    It’s the #1 death risk factor for pregnant women in America is getting shot by husband/boyfriend.

    Spousal murder is the #1 gun homicide.

  25. jenl says:

    Does anyone really believe that Mitt Romney cares about or can relate to the middle class or people who are struggling?

    That said I think the President is at risk of losing women(and men) if he does not sharpen his economic plan and message. This is not to downplay the importance of social issues. However, people – men and women alike – are looking for a leader who has a plan for the economy and job creation. I am certainly not saying that Romney has a real plan but he has a much cleaner message (regardless of how ludicrous his Five Point Plan is). Now is the time for the President to tighten up his message and move away from attacks. Like it or not Romney has established credibility through the debates. Draw distinctions but do so through a hopeful clear message – not one that tries to include everything. We are investing in the future, building the foundation via education and science. The President now needs to offer a clear economic plan and a clear vision which people can understand and remember.

  26. DM says:

    The president has no new economic plan…that’s the problem and the reason Mittens R.Money is gaining in the polls.

  27. puck says:

    Obama has an economic plan and it is a good one, but nobody really believes he will follow through with it, because it is the same plan he ran on in 2008 and didn’t follow through on.

    Obama’s 2008 tax reform plan was an excellent one – “Let the Bush tax cuts expire.” Nobody elected Obama on any tax reform pledge other than letting the Bush tax cuts expire. But we know how that worked out.

    Now we have grand deals and Bowles Simpson, which we never asked for (they were all Obama’s idea), competing with the obvious, effective, and politically do-able reform plan of letting the tax cuts expire. I’m not sure which plan Obama intends to fight for.

  28. Jason330 says:

    Don’t let the truth interfere with your ennui.

  29. socialistic ben says:

    I know Obama wasn’t the main person who extended the Bush tax cuts, but he could have acted a little more like he was forced into hi actions. He was going to lose that fight no matter what…. he could have lost it actually fighting.

  30. puck says:

    So assuming Obama wins and we still have the Senate – which economic plan do you think Obama will fight for?

    I think keeping Obama from cutting taxes for the rich again will be a harder task than winning the election.

  31. Jason330 says:

    Poor chap. Having been burned, you can’t envision a world in which you don’t get burned again. As for me, I see a President who has said time and again that he would only sign off on a balanced solution. Being a liberal, I grant that I’m an optimist.

  32. puck says:

    I have my good days and my bad days.

    Actually letting the Bush cuts expire would be a better tax reform than any “balanced solution” that could possibly be passed politically. Stop inventing “solutions” and just let the godawful cuts expire. After that, every bill is a tax cut, not a tax increase. That would take Norquist out of the game – tweak the taxes then, put the middle class cuts back if you want.

  33. Jason330 says:

    Good point. BTW – You let yourself get baiting into this by DM, a Republican troll. Just sayin’