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Showing posts with label presidential election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label presidential election. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Romney: the sour-grapes candidate

Romney_bribed_with_gifts


There were many times during the 2012 election when Romney appeared to have lost the election. One of the most significant was the 47% video:

 

 

 

 

So, from this, we learn that Mitt Romney believes that almost half the American people are unrealistic, selfish, and greedy.  They can’t be enticed to vote for him, so he won’t bother talking to them.

 

 

Whether because of this video, or for many other reasons, he lost the election.

 

 

Most Presidential candidates shut up promptly after losing the election. The exceptions are interesting. Nixon complained in 1961 that Kennedy had stolen the election. Nixon then roared back in 1968 (and six years later resigned the Presidency in disgrace, having committed most or all of the crimes he’d accused Kennedy of in 1960). Al Gore didn’t shut up after 2000, with good reason; he’d won the popular vote, and the electoral vote depended on Florida, which was (effectively) decided by the right-leaning US Supreme Court.

 

 

But Mitt Romney won’t shut up.

 

 

He said, shortly after the election, that Obama won because he promised “gifts” to his followers. Please follow this link to hear that the Salt Lake Tribune had to say about that.

 

 

A MSNBC commentator made a very sensible point about this recently: of course Presidential candidates offer us “gifts”! They’re called campaign promises! If I’m presented with two candidates, and one of them promises to end legalized abortion, eliminate “unnecessary” programs in the arts and sciences and education, and opposes gay rights – I will tell him that these are not the “gifts” I require.

 

 

Most lately, Romney’s son Tagg (I love that name!) has stated that his father didn’t want to be President in any case. As follows:

 

 

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” Tagg Romney told the (Boston) Globe. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside.”

The Globe article also noted that “Tagg … worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency.”

 

 

 

So what’s all this about? Did Mitt want the Presidency or not?

 

 

 

Perhaps, as the New Yorker recently remarked, the GOP really ought to have run someone for President who really wanted to be President.

 


 

 

Thursday, December 6, 2012

2012 Election Post-Mortem: Why Don't Minorities Vote Republican?

2012_election_minorities


Partner and I often watch “Up with Chris Hayes” on weekend mornings. I find him a bit shrill and wordy, but at least I agree with him and most of his guests. (And, as we all know, we all prefer to listen to people who confirm our beliefs and – gulp! – prejudices.)

 

 

On the morning of November 10, Chris had a very nice gentleman named Avik Roy on his panel. Avik is an American of Indian ancestry, whose expertise is in health care issues, and was described on the show as FORMER ROMNEY CAMPAIGN ADVISOR.

 

 

He was very gentle and reasonable on the show, which was to be expected; his party (and his candidate) had just lost a big election, and he was surrounded by political opponents (mostly raving liberals, like yours truly).

 

 

But he still said some ridiculous things.

 

 

Such as:

 

 

“My mother is a very conservative person: she’s frugal, she believes in self-reliance. She’s a natural Republican. But she insists on voting for Democrats.”

 

 

And: “The Republican Party is about small government, and fiscal conservatism. It’s not about bigotry or racial disenfranchisement.”

 

 

And: “I understand how Mexican immigrants, legal or illegal, must feel in the United States. But I feel more strongly for the people who have tried to enter legally. I think of the Indian school valedictorian who wanted to enter the United States, but who found that he/she wasn’t able to get a visa because of the Obama administration’s policies, and I ask myself if this is really fairness.”

 

 

These are all valid opinions, stated respectfully and intelligently, and I respect all three of them.

 

 

Except that they’re all completely specious.

 

 

#1: “My mother is a very conservative person: she’s frugal, she believes in self-reliance. She’s a natural Republican. But she insists on voting for Democrats.” Kiddo: your mother has dark skin. She has been experiencing American racial prejudice for longer than you have, and in a more intense way. The Democrats are an inclusive party, and welcomes minorities; of course your mother feels more comfortable with them. You, Avik, are younger, and more educated, and have grown up in a more liberal society, and have experienced much less prejudice as a result. Do you get that?

 

 

#2: “The Republican Party is about small government, and fiscal conservatism. It’s not about bigotry or racial disenfranchisement.” The first sentence is more or less true. Sadly, the second sentence is not true. As several other panel members explained to Avik Roy on the show, Nixon’s Southern Strategy was all about using bigotry to get people to vote Republican. At the beginning, it was just a campaign strategy: the Republicans get bigots to vote for the GOP, and once they’re in office, they’ll quietly ignore that section of the electorate. (Nixon was a pretty awful president, and a bigot, but he didn’t legislate bigotry.) Over time, however, the bigots realized they were being snubbed by the GOP, and insisted on representation. So we get terms like “illegals” and “welfare cheats,” and we know that we mean “Hispanics” and “African-Americans.” So, Avik, I’m afraid your party – for many reason – has in fact espoused bigotry as a vote-getting method, and (once in office) tends to legislate that bigotry.

 

 

Worst of all, #3: “I think of the Indian school valedictorian who wanted to enter the United States, but who found that he/she wasn’t able to get a visa because of the Obama administration’s policies, and I ask myself if this is really fairness.” Oh, Avik. Do you think that the average Republican voter, in Mississippi or Wyoming or Arizona, would welcome that Indian school valedictorian in the United States? Certainly not. He’s not white, Avik.  

 

 

Avik, Avik. Go have a chat with your mother. And get a clue.


 

 

Saturday, November 17, 2012

The 2012 Presidential election: why the Republicans lost

Why_the_republicans_lost

Sometimes, when good things happen – as with the reelection of Barack Obama – I begin to reassure himself that things in general are getting better.

 

 

And, I suppose, they are.

 

 

But some things don’t change.

 

 

I had hoped that the GOP would understand, after four years, that Obama is not a fluke or a trickster. I had hoped they would stop pretending that he was the lovechild of Kwame Nkrumah and Lenin. I had hoped also that they would acknowledge that, Obama having won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, that he definitely possesses a mandate from the American people.

 

 

I was wrong.

 

 

Their party line, after two weeks, is still crystallizing. Given that they can’t admit that they were well and fairly beaten at the polls, they have come up with some (moderately ridiculous, and mutually contradictory) reasons for their loss.

 

 

(Naturally they didn’t lose because of their message, or their candidate, or their poor organization, or their alienation of large chunks of the electorate.)

 

 

Here are some of their rationalizations:

 

 

1)    We were outnumbered! (This is from Rush Limbaugh. I let this one speak for itself. Imagine being outnumbered in a democracy!)

2)    Voter fraud was rampant! (See this ridiculous Wisconsin senator’s statement that, if voter ID were universal, we wouldn’t have any more of these silly Democratic victories.)

3)    Obama voters were bribed with “gifts”! (Romney himself said this recently.)

4)    Poor beautiful Paul Ryan – he of the big luminous eyes – recently commented that he and Mitt lost because of the “urban vote.” What do you think that means? Why, minorities, of course. Minority voters kept Obama in, and Romney out, of the White House. How uppity of them!

 

 

I recently found a wonderful graphic showing minority representation in the House and Senate (including women, who are certainly not a minority of the US population). Here it is:

 

 

Freshmen-facebook-036

 

 

Please examine it and tell me how many Republicans you find.

 

 

Now tell me what conclusions you draw.

 

 

Here’s to another combative – but, I hope, constructive – four years.


 

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

The 2012 Presidential election: a corporate viewpoint

Corporate_response


Lots of stuff has happened since last week’s election – almost more than I can keep track of. But here are two wonderful stories:

 

 

The day after Barack Obama won his re-election bid, the chief executive of Murray Energy, Robert E. Murray, gathered his staff and began to read a prayer. He asked God to forgive America for its choice of president, and he prayed for “guidance in this drastic time with the drastic decisions that will be made to have any hope of our survival as an American business enterprise.” He closed with a heartfelt “amen.”

 

Then he fired 156 people.

 

Murray explained that the layoffs were inevitable in light of Obama’s re-election. He’s not the only coal baron to cite the president as the cause of the industry’s supposed death knell. CONSOL Energy Inc. President Nicholas Deluliis blamed Obama for 145 planned layoffs, while Alpha Natural Resources CEO Kevin Crutchfield cited the Obama-created “regulatory environment” as the basis for 1,200 job cuts this fall. (See the full story on Slate.)

 

 

 

Isn’t that nice?

 

 

Here’s another story:

 

 

Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter, who previously said that President Obama’s health care program would force the company to raise the price of pizza, now says the health care law could cause franchises to slice full-time employees’ hours.

Schnatter, who supported Republican Mitt Romney, made the comments Wednesday night to students at Edison State College in Naples, Fla., where Schnatter has a vacation home.

The Anchorage resident’s initial comment came in August when hetold stock analysts during a conference call that the cost of the Affordable Care Act will lead the company to raise its prices 11 to 14 cents per pizza. (From the Louisville Courier-Journal.)

 

 

Some thoughts:

 

 

-      I’m sorry to get all Marxist on you, but I need to remind you that owners will always exploit workers, and owners will always howl when government tries to make them treat workers better. This is why regulation is necessary.

-      Unions are vital to uphold the interests of labor. This ain’t just my philosophy – it’s in my bones. My mother (who grew up in a coal-mining area near Seattle) told me that, when she was a little girl, she used to go down to the mines during strikes and throw lumps of coal at the scabs.

-      Is Schnatter serious? Fourteen cents a pizza? That’s horrendous. Imagine! Just to make sure his employees have health care!

-      The coal industry is horribly corrupt as it is. It’s sweetly evil to see that the coal CEO quoted in the first piece began with a prayer for the salvation of America. I imagine a lot of his employees are praying for something quite different.

 

 

Now the good news: a majority of American voters backed Obama. Republicans are losing seats – not enough to make a huge difference, but the tide is turning.

 

 

So remember not to buy Papa John’s pizza.

 

 

(Not that you would anyway. It tastes like cardboard with pepperoni on top.)


 

 

Monday, November 12, 2012

Voting cute

Voting_cute


There is an old truism that the handsomer presidential candidate usually wins. Sometimes it’s true: Warren Harding was very distinguished-looking, and Kennedy was certainly better-looking than Nixon.

 

 

I voted for Barack Obama last week (of course I did!), but I have to admit, to my shame, that I don’t think he was the handsomer of the two candidates. Mitt Romney, for all his wishy-washy political loathsomeness, is very good-looking, and Paul Ryan is perfectly dreamy.

 

 

Somehow, however, I managed to vote with my brain, not my hormones.

 

 

Does this really work? One wonders whether McCain’s advisors thought Sarah Palin added sex appeal to the campaign. (I honestly wonder if Romney’s advisors thought the same about Ryan.) John Kerry (who’s merely acceptable-looking) chose the soap-opera handsome John Edwards as VP in 2004. (It was only later that we discovered what a scuzzball Edwards really was. OMG! Fox News was actually right about something!) Clinton was certainly a more attractive man than either George H. W. Bush or Bob Dole.

 

 

And so on, and so on.

 

 

Does it really make a difference?

 

 

Sometimes.

 

 

In 1972 I managed to get my mother to register to vote, so that she could vote for George McGovern. (Dad registered too, and I’m certain he voted for Nixon, not that it did the country much good.) Mom got a little nostalgic. “This is only the second time I’ve voted,” she told me. “The first time was in 1948, and I voted for Tom Dewey, because he was so cute. I loved his mustache.”

 

 

So there you have it.


 

Friday, November 9, 2012

Election 2012 post-mortem: people who want stuff

Election_2012_postmortem


The Republicans, over the past few days, have been trying to figure out why they didn’t win the Presidency on Tuesday. More than that: they actually lost ground (especially in the Senate). The House of Representatives still has a Republican majority, but at least ten of the vicious Tea Party Republicans elected in 2010 got unseated.

 

 

Why did they lose?

 

 

Well, as a Democrat/Socialist, I know why they lost. But I was curious to see what they themselves thought.

 

 

Here’s a selection of theories:

 

-         Voter fraud. (We all know that Democrats excel at voter fraud!) This one was probably best brought forward by Donald Trump, who recommended that Romney voters march on Washington.

-         Fuzzy math. (Did you see the Wall Street Journal red/blue map? It shows vast swaths of red through Wyoming and Oklahoma and Texas, and tiny blue segments in NYC and Boston and Seattle. The clear implication: How can so much of the country have gone Republican, and still have lost? Apparently there are a lot of people who don’t understand math, or how voting works. We don’t vote by square mileage, as Stephen Colbert wisely pointed out.)

-         Voter intimidation. (Fox News, on election night, featured a suspicious-looking black man outside a Pennsylvania polling place, holding the door for people. A Black Panther! A terrorist!)

-         Bad polling. (Nate Silver, who appears to have perfected the art of probabilistic polling, was attacked during the pre-campaign months – Joe Scarborough called him a “joke,” and some other GOP hack called him “effeminate.” And yet he called the election with great precision. As Colbert said: “Math has a liberal bias.”)

 

 

But, most viscerally at all, let’s listen to Bill O’Reilly for a moment:

 

 

“We’re changing demographically. We’re changing our attitudes. We’re becoming more like Western Europe … and I’m not going to generalize about any ethnic group, it’s a mentality that pervades across society … some people are saying, ‘I don’t want to do it, but I want them to do it for me.

“Obama wins because it’s not a traditional America anymore. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.

“You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?

“The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore.”

 

 

We are no longer all white. We are no longer all men, or all straight, or non-Hispanic.

 

 

I think that’s right, actually.

 

 

And do we want stuff?

 

 

You bet we do.

 

 

We want rights. Gay people want the right to get married. Hispanic people want the right not to be treated as second-class citizens. Black people want the right not to be treated the way Trayvon Martin was treated.

 

 

We all want stuff.

 

 

We just don’t want the stuff that Bill O’Reilly says (or thinks) we want.

 

 

We’re not Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens.” We don’t want money. We want rights. We want respect.

 

 

Does the GOP understand this? Most of all, do they understand it deeply enough to change their attitudes, and their party’s attitudes, for the next election?

 

 

We’ll see.

 

 

(Somehow, however, I doubt it.)


 

 

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Lessons from the 2012 Presidential campaign

2012_election


It has taken me a little while to compose myself after Election Night 2012.  Now that I’ve stopped screaming with joy, however, I’ve jotted down a few things I’ve learned over the past few weeks and months.

 

 

As follows:

 

 

Probably you shouldn’t try to redefine the word “rape.” It doesn’t make you many friends. (Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock: hear me?)

 

 

Money doesn’t necessarily win elections.  When it’s quite evident that you’re trying to buy a House/Senate seat (McMahon in Connecticut, Hinckley in Rhode Island), you will probably lose. And Donald Trump publicly mocked Karl Rove for wasting millions of dollars of PAC money on candidates who lost. (As a Tumblr commentator said: Who knows more than Donald Trump about wasting money?)

 

 

Lying is very traditional in American presidential elections, but it’s getting easier and easier to disprove a lie. Probably people should try to lie less (or at least more cleverly). And they should not openly flout the fact-checkers.

 

 

In a state where people traditionally hate and fear state troopers (like Rhode Island, for example), the opposition party shouldn’t nominate a state trooper as their candidate. (Bye-bye, Brendan Doherty.)

 

 

Don’t make fun of your opponent. It makes you look small. (This one goes out to former Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who insisted on belittling his opponent Elizabeth Warren as a liar, as ugly, as untrustworthy, as a “college professor.” It didn’t work, did it, Scotty?)

 

 

Do not, in your concession speech, imply that God made your opponent win in order to make the Apocalypse happen sooner. (Okay, Mr. God-be-the-glory Todd Akin?)

 

 

Don’t assume that gay marriage is a passing fad. Before Tuesday, every popular referendum on gay marriage had failed, and the Republicans / social conservatives were convinced they had a failsafe way to defeat gay marriage: bring it to a popular vote. Well, on Tuesday, four states voted, and three (Washington, Maine, and Maryland) upheld gay marriage. You can be sure the GOP will be less confident in future about this particular strategy. (So Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee can take their Chick-fil-A sandwiches and jam them up one another’s asses. And they can make sure those sandwiches are up there real tight, too.)

 

 

And finally:

 

 

The country is changing. We are more diverse, and more tolerant, as a whole. (A commentator in 2008, shortly after Obama’s first election, said that bigotry and intolerance in the USA would decrease over time, but (like seawater evaporating) they would become more concentrated and intense. I remember thinking this was a very wise thing to say. Now, after four years of concentrated intense vicious hatred of Obama and the liberal agenda, I see how prescient he was.) But we are not Sarah Palin’s America, and we are not Mitt Romney’s America (whatever the hell that was supposed to be about). We are a multicolored America. We do not care to be ruled by Christian law, or Sharia law, or any kind of religious law for that matter. We like our marijuana. We like being married to our common-law partners. We like Planned Parenthood. We like knowing that, if we become ill, we will not go into bankruptcy if we go to the doctor. We have no problem with electing women, and gays, and differently-abled people; in fact, we’re proud to be represented by them.

 

 

Let the right-wing nuts shriek about socialism and the Death of America, kids. They’ll tucker themselves out in a while, and we can have some peace, maybe even through Inauguration Day.

 

 

And I’m sure the 2016 campaign won’t begin before June or July of 2013.

 

 

(I plan to vote for Hillary. How about you?)


 

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

For Election Day 2012: Homer Simpson votes Republican!

Simpson_obama_romney


I learned a lot from this clip. I already knew that Romney invented Obamacare. However: did you know that the government actually paid Romney taxes for five years? And that Romney has six wives, all named Ann?

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

And vote, for God’s sake.

 

 


 

 

Monday, October 22, 2012

Paul Ryan; or, this year's Sarah Palin

Paul_ryan_workout


I should open this article by saying something nice about Paul Ryan.

 

 

Okay: he has pretty eyes.

 

 

Now on to some other issues.

 

 

Ryan is a “fiscal heavyweight.” He actually concocted a budget!

 

 

(Actually, budgets are easy to create; an intelligent ten-year old can put one together. Income should equal expenditures; if it doesn’t, then you need to spend less, or earn more, or some combination of the two. The question is: what kinds of things do we spend less on?

 

 

(Oh, that’s easy. The arts. Education. Social programs. Who needs ‘em?

 

 

(Not to mention health care – which, after all, is a non-issue, since (as G. W. Bush reminded us some years back), everyone can always go to an emergency room.)

 

 

In any case, I don’t think Ryan is quite ready for the national stage. Take the following incidents as examples:

 

 

-          He appeared in a soup-kitchen photo op, madly scrubbing a pot. Turns out the pot was already clean, and the soup kitchen didn’t even want him there in the first place.

-          He made a personal appearance at a football game and made a long congratulatory speech to the quarterback. Except that it turned out he was the wrong quarterback.

-          Then there’s the whole issue of those workout photos. Remember that adorable picture of Sarah Palin wearing a bikini and holding a gun? Same thing. Except, of course, that the Palin picture was photoshopped, and the Ryan photos are real.

 

 

The Right likes to portray Joe Biden as Mister Malaprop. Perhaps they should have given their own VP choice another look this year. They have a history of choosing doofuses for the position, like Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin; I do believe they might have done it again.

 

 

But those eyes: it’s a day’s work just to look into them.


 

 

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Living under an enemy administration

Nixon1960litho


On Election Night 1980, I was in the Graduate Center Bar at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, watching the election returns. The media declared Reagan the winner over Carter fairly early, as I recall. I was standing next to a short fat guy, who muttered: “Now it’s our turn.”

 

 

I got the creeps all over as he said it.

 

 

As it turned out, I had the creeps for another twelve years.

 

 

I have lived under a Republican Presidency for most of my life, as I calculate it: 1957-1960 (three years of Eisenhower, which I barely remember, as I was a toddler); 1969-1976 (seven years of Nixon/Ford, which was intermittently disastrous, but not entirely catastrophic); 1980-1992 (eight years of Ronald Reagan, tragedy/comedy, and four years of G. H. W. Bush, mostly comedy, with the terrifying exception of Operation Desert Storm); and eight years of George W. Bush (pure disaster).

 

 

So that’s thirty years of my life under a Republican administration. And I am still alive.

 

 

To be sure, Eisenhower was not out to kill or disenfranchise me. Nixon, much as he was a rascal, did not try to do so either. Gerald Ford, God bless him, was not the kind of person to do harm to a little periwinkle like me. G. H. W. Bush was a quasi-jerk, but not as extreme as his son. G. W. Bush was a total jerk, and eight years of him was agony.

 

 

Mitt Romney has declared himself against gay marriage, abortion, Affordable Care, etc. He says he wants to “take back America.” From whom? I don’t have it at the moment; I feel, in fact, that I am not so much in control of anything in America. So who’s he taking it back from?

 

 

Mitt Romney is the total anti-package. He is what I do not want.

 

 

I do not want to find myself on election night in November 2012, with a sweaty little fat man standing next to me, watching Romney being declared winner, and hearing him say: “Now it’s our turn.”

 

 

Once is enough.

 

 

Kids: you know what you have to do.

 

 

Vote, please. Vote your hearts. And make sure your friends and family vote. (And if you’re unlucky enough to have family in a Republican-controlled state, help them get their ID cards.)

 

 

Keep climbing.

 

 

We can do this.


 

 

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Mitt Romney and his tax returns

Romney_tax


I hate the last two months of a presidential election.

 

 

The ads are everywhere. I only thank Ganesha that I live in a non-swing state, where they’re not spending tons of money on ads. In Ohio and Florida, people must be committing suicide because of the political ads on TV.

 

 

Naturally the Romney ads, and statements, drive me bonkers. Only the other evening, on “Hardball,” I saw a Romney ad showing a white middle-class couple clucking in disapproval over Obama’s support of gay marriage. “That’s not the kind of change I had in mind,” they said, judgmentally.

 

 

Well, go f*** yourselves, imaginary political-ad married couple.

 

 

And then, the other day, Romney said, in advance of the debates, that Obama will lie. Isn’t it lovely to call your opponent a liar in advance of anything he’s said?

 

 

(Also – just a word about Paul Ryan. He is the male Sarah Palin, isn’t he? A younger, cuter Mitt Romney. His ideas amount to approximately nada; economists – real economists, that is – have looked at his “budget plan” and shown it to be completely unrealistic and naïve. We’re supposed to take him seriously? Check out Paul Krugman – a Nobel Prize-winning economist – on the subject.)

 

 

(But I digress.)

 

 

Let’s talk about Mitt Romney, the business candidate.

 

 

Where I work, we do background checks on prospective employees. The higher-level they are, the more we want to know. If they’re being hired into positions with financial authority, we want to know as much as possible about their background, and often run a credit check.

 

 

(Did Mitt Romney’s various companies do the same? I will wager that they did. It’s silly not to, isn’t it?)

 

 

But Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns, because the Obama campaign might use them against him. 

 

 

Well, not if they’re honest. Because, if they’re honest, how could they be a problem?

 

 

Unless there are some problems. Or inconsistencies. Or . . .

 

 

Hm.

 

 

Oh Mitt Mitt Mitt.

 

 

Vote Obama, kids.


 

 

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Ann Romney, the average American housewife

Annromneymittromney_jeffhaynes_reuters


Here is a brief excerpt from a presentation given by Ann Romney a few days ago in Stamford, Connecticut:

 

 

Romney also recalled raising her boys solo until the birth of her fifth son.

 

 

“I didn’t have help for many many years. As a matter of fact I didn’t have help at all until the fifth baby was born and I had emergency surgery when he was four months old,” Mrs. Romney said. “And I was in bed and realized I couldn’t take care of five boys with Mitt working so hard and needed a little extra help. “

 

 

She offered more detail than usual about her life at home.

 

 

“I know what’s like to finish the laundry and to look in the basket five minutes later and it’s full again. I know what’s like to pull all the groceries in and see the teenagers run through and all of a sudden all the groceries you just bought are gone,” Romney said to the crowd. “And I know what’s like to get up early in the morning and to get them off to school. And I know what’s like to get up in the middle of the night when they’re sick. And I know what’s like to struggle and to have those concerns that all mothers have.”

 

 

Romney alluded to the fact that not all women can stay at home saying, “I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.”

 

 

Did you get that?

 

 

Ann loves the fact that some of us don’t have a choice, and can’t hire outside help – even after our fifth child! – because we don’t have enough money.  (Why exactly she loves that is a little beyond me. She loves the fact that people struggle?)

 

 

The husband was pulling in mucho cash, and we are told to believe that Ann was worried about grocery money, and exhausted from doing so much laundry.

 

 

Give. Us. A. Break.

 

 

How much household help do you have, reader?  (Partner and I have only stuffed animals, who are utterly useless when it comes to household chores.)

 

We Democrats are hoping Mitt brings Ann out a lot more often on the campaign trail.  She really speaks to women.

 

In all the wrong ways.