In a sign of how the general election campaign is now well underway, the big debate yesterday was over…caterpillars. Or, rather, “the War on Women.” And whether it’s real or not. And whether a key Republican official was somehow likening women to caterpillars.
Welcome to American politics 21st century style where now more than ever the act of mouthing words is supposed to somehow create a new reality even if it’s at variance with the facts.
At issue were the comments of Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus who was trying to downplay what Democrats call the GOP’s “War on Women” by using a clumsy and not-supported-by-polls assertion likening it to a war on insects in response to a question by Bloomberg’s Al Hunt:
HUNT: Let me ask you this. The Democrats of course say you are waging, the GOP is waging a war on women. I know you don’t agree with that, but looking at the polls, you have a gender gap problem. Recent polls show a huge, huge margin for Democrats among women voters. How big a problem is it? How do you close it?
PRIEBUS: Well, for one thing, if the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars, and mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we have problems with caterpillars. The fact of the matter is it’s a fiction and this started a war against the Vatican that this president pursued. He still hasn’t answered Archbishop Dolan’s issues with Obama world and Obamacare, so I think that’s the first issue.
Priebus’ comment is classic political misdirection: a)polls now indicate the Republicans and Mitt Romney in particular have a serious problem with womenand this gender gap is growing b)even Joe Scarborough has noted how his wife and other Republican women are ahgast and furious over their parties’ position on some issues that are related to women c)Priebus tries to change the subject by shifting to the Vatican.
But the political reaction was (sigh) predictable:
“Reince Priebus’ comparison of Republican attempts to limit women’s access to mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, and contraception to a ‘war on caterpillars’ shows how little regard leading Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have for women’s health,” said Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter.
That point is debateable. By our watching — and reading — Priebus is picking a fanciful idea (a war on caterpillars) to call into question the idea that Republicans are engaged in a war on women. He’s only comparing caterpillars to women if you accept the first premise — that the GOP is indeed conducting this war.
The larger point here is that Democrats are going great-guns to drive a wedge between Republicans (and specifically former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney) and women, using even the thinnest of threads — and that’s what this seems to be — to build a narrative that the GOP is no friend to females.
Meanwhile, on some liberal talk shows that raised the issue, the issue was accurately portrayed as Priebus comparing the “war on women” to a war on caterpillars but in most of the discussions someone would also suggest he was comparing women to caterpillars.
The realities:
#1 Republicans do have a big polling problem and are losing the support of women.
#2 Preibus was doing damage control. But denying that Republican policies are not favored by many women and somehow the creation of the Democrats and that evil, mean, conspiratorial media (a media that if you ever worked for a newspaper or broadcastoutlet you KNOW is not conspiring with other news outlets but in competition with them and autonomous) is a bunch of this.
#3 Any insinuations that Preibus was comparing women to caterpillars in his statement is a bunch of this.
But, as the Washington Post notes, if there is a debate over whether there is a war “on” women, there is most assuredly a war over them.
Is there a “war on women” going on? That is a matter of dispute between the parties these days.
But one thing is certain: There is a battle raging over them.
If that wasn’t clear after weeks of argument over contraceptive coverage, it became so Thursday, when caterpillars and country clubs got dragged into the fray.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus dismissed the “war on women” meme as a concoction of Democrats and their sympathizers in the news media.
“If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars, and mainstream media outlet[s] talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we have problems with caterpillars,” Priebus said.
No surprise, that brought a swift reaction from Democrats.
President Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, issued a statement contending that the RNC chairman’s “comparison of Republican attempts to limit women’s access to mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, and contraception to a ‘war on caterpillars’ shows how little regard leading Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have for women’s health.”
Also on Thursday, Obama weighed in on whether women should be admitted as members to the all-male Augusta National Country Club, site of this week’s Masters tournament. The long-standing dispute has gained currency this year because a woman, Virginia Rometty, is now chief executive of IBM, a longtime sponsor of the tournament whose previous chief executives have been admitted to Augusta.
The president’s “personal opinion is that women should be admitted,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said, adding that Obama thinks “it’s long past the time when women should be excluded from anything.”
Two Republican presidential candidates followed with their own declarations that the club should admit women.
The Daily Beast’s Patricia Murphy, in a post on whether it’s too late to Romney to win over women has this:
The good news for Mitt Romney is that he is not without all hope when it comes to winning back the independent women who have fled in droves from supporting him to favoring President Barack Obama for the November election. But the bad news is that it’s going to take a lot more than Romney calling for women to join Augusta National, as he did Thursday, to get back the crucial voting block’s good graces.
Note that in this article as well it is consider a f-a-c-t that the GOP is losing women voters. She ends her must read in full piece with this:
Celinda Lake, a top Democratic pollster, says that Romney still has an opportunity among independent women, but his party has made his job infinitely more difficult for him with a focus on contraception and abortion issues in Congress and in state houses across the country……Lake predicted that independent women will remain persuadable by both campaigns right up to the end of the campaign cycle, but said that Romney will have to hit the reset button very soon to reverse the trend.
Democrats have no intention of making Romney’s sales pitch to women any easier. They have pounced on women’s issues and doubled down on their appeals to independents in particular since the swing-state poll revealed the gaping gender gap that Romney is facing. In addition to their already-launched Women for Obama and DNC Women’s Institute, Democrats are holding events and rallies—at the White House and across the country—to tell women that Democrats care about the same issues they do.
When I spoke with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, on Thursday afternoon, she spoke on a BlackBerry from Philadelphia after a press conference in the city’s Love Park, where she was highlighting the “GOP ‘No Love For Women’ Agenda.”
When I asked her what else Democrats are planning to appeal to women, she said the GOP had already done a lot of the work for her. “Actually the Republicans and Mitt Romney have done a good job of bringing this on themselves. We wouldn’t have as much to talk about if they weren’t engaged in taking positions that are so offensive to women and are so out of touch.”
AND:
Conservative women say they’ll be there for Romney—or whatever Republican wins the nomination—to defeat President Obama. But they will be voting because of social issues, not in spite of them.
“There is not a war on women,” said Mallory Quigley, communications director for the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that opposes abortion rights and has endorsed Santorum. “Women that we see across the country are pro-life, they want conscience protections for health-care workers and religious institutions. There is a war on them. The voices of the pro-life women are being pushed to the side by the abortion lobby and by the president, who are saying, ‘You’re not the kind of woman we’re concerned about.’”
Celinda Lake predicted that the race for independent women’s votes will come down to the economy in the end and suggested that Democrats talk about kitchen-table issues, like food prices, cuts to summer jobs programs and after-school programs, help for small businesses and health care, all topics that women focus on and worry about on a daily basis.
But she said the door is still open for Romney to make inroads. Although Romney does not need to win the women’s vote in November, he must at least hold his losses to the single digits in percentage terms.
“The Romney campaign has to convince these women to take a second look. And when they take that second look, they have to see something different from what they’ve been seeing in their right-wing legislators in Congress or Rush Limbaugh,” she said.
“This is a tightrope that he’s walking and it’s not going to be easy. And he’s not going to be able to do it just by saying women should be able to golf at Augusta.”
Perhaps this is more a battle between political leeches with Ds and Rs in front of their names, rather than women…or caterpillars.
UPDATE: On Morning Joe, comments from Joe Scarborough:
“One thing I don’t think we’ve said here that just needs to be out here…” said Scarborough, is that “some of the most intense conservative pro-life people I have ever met are women in the Republican party. Most of the people that write me really nasty emails — and I’m sure you all get them and text on social issues — are mainly women. It’s not just men in the back rooms of country clubs that are putting these pieces of legislation together.”
The panelists agreed that Priebus hasn’t been comparing women to insects, merely that he’d used a clumsy metaphor to make his point — a point that some have found offensive on its own, given they disagree with Priebus and do see a very real, ongoing attack on women.
“I can tell you,” Scarborough later continued, “Planned Parenthood, in my neighborhood, is not seen as a noble organization… My only point is what I said earlier, that people [who] cover this story, be very careful to understand there are a lot of people who are pro-life, there are a lot of people who do not see Planned Parenthood as a positive force in America.”
“A war against Planned Parenthood,” he concluded, “is not seen by many women in America as a war on women.”
But the charge of a “War on Women” isn’t only about Planned Parenthood: it’s about Republican pushed state laws that were intrusive when it came to women’s bodies, general comments about contraception, and the belated responses, mushy responses or silence of prominent GOPers when Rush Limbaugh spent three days bashing a female law school student. And, as noted above, Scarborough himself had noted on an earlier broadcast his wife’s reaction. Planned Parenthood is not what the Democrats’ catch phrase refers to.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.