IT’S A curious thing that Mitt Romney won’t say he fully supports equal pay. It comes off tone deaf, even hostile towards women’s economic equality. In the race for the women’s vote, “Bindergate” hit “Morning Joe” today, while Buzzfeed reports many of the women in Romney’s binders were campaign contributors. Long forgotten is Obama’s boys’ club, which is now getting a new life.
Paul Ryan made the case for Romney on CBS “This Morning,” saying “of course” he and Mitt Romney support financial equality. Ryan’s problem, so it could also be Romney’s, is that the Lily Ledbetter Act encouraged lawsuits, according to Republicans. It’s a lame excuse, because women who have been wronged deserve to have recourse to right them.
So, obviously Mitt needs help, which NRO provided in two posts here and here, one that gets former lieutenant governor Karen Healy on the record sticking up for her former boss, while the other hits Obama.
There’s been multiple reports, including in books like Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, which I’ve read, that there has been a real boys’ club in the Obama administration.
“This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” – Book: Women in Obama White House felt excluded and ignored [Washington Post, 2011]
Amy Sullivan wrote about the same thing in 2011 for Time magazine.
The first time I noticed something was awry, I was flipping through the White House Flickr album from Obama’s first 100 days in office. About halfway through, I realized something was missing. Shot after shot showed Oval Office meetings filled with men in dark suits. But apart from occasional appearances by Hillary Clinton and Valerie Jarrett–and one photo of an Oval Office meeting that included Jarrett and several other female advisers–women were mostly absent from the workplace shots.
I knew the problem wasn’t a lack of women on staff at the White House. A 2009 analysis of White House salary data did find that while women outnumbered men in the lowest salary brackets, there were only 58 women in the 142 highest senior staff positions at the Obama White House.
The women’s vote could make the difference.
Lieutenant governor Karen Healy’s comments in NRO do add something to the conversation.
“I imagine that anyone who had ever walked into Governor Romney’s office would know that for a fact because his chief of staff whose office was directly in front of his was Beth Myers,” Healy says. “She went on to become his campaign manager when he ran for president. His top policy adviser and governmental liaison was Cindy Gillespie, a woman who had been his adviser as well at the Olympics, and come with him to serve in Massachusetts 00 [sic] a Democrat, I might add, although I think she may be a Republican by this time. He had asked me to run with him and serve with him as lieutenant governor.”
“There was in no way a boys’-club atmosphere in our administration,” Healy adds, “and I think that that contrasts very starkly with what we have heard from the accounts of some female staffers in the White House who have called the atmosphere in the White House a hostile workplace.”
Team Obama’s ad above hits Romney on having “condescending views towards women.”
I’m waiting for the ad from Romney that accuses Obama of “a boys’ club” inside the White House.
Romney’s problems where women are concerned mirror those of today’s Republican Party, though Romney’s come close to evening the odds with President Obama, because of economic issues.
That’s why Romney should run the ad below, reported by Maggie Haberman.
The ad below touches on the one question many women still have about Romney. It’s deceptive, because it doesn’t address women’s self-determination that Romney-Ryan oppose, and goes well beyond being a “social issue.”