Ann Romney defends her stay-at-home mom status to critics (now with Hilary Rosen's response

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nrthshgrl
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Ann Romney defends her stay-at-home mom status to critics (now with Hilary Rosen's response - 1st post)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ann-romney-defends-her-stay-at-home-mom-status-to-critics/2012/04/12/gIQAlplHDT_story.html

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Ann Romney, wife of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and mother of five sons, is fighting a claim that she “never worked a day in her life.”

“I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys,” she wrote in a Twitter message -- a social-media debut prompted by a Democrat’s challenge of her knowledge about the economy. “Believe me,” Romney wrote. “It was hard work.”

As the Republican presidential contest winds its way ever closer to the GOP convention, the candidates continue to hit the campaign trail ahead of various primaries in an effort to win the requisite number of delegates for the party nomination.
Gallery

Hillary Rosen, a Democratic strategist, started the exchange during an interview on CNN yesterday in which she said of Mitt Romney: “Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life.” Rosen said: “She’s never dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of women in this country are facing.”

The expanding debate -- with advisers of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign swiftly distancing themselves from Rosen’s remarks -- underscores a challenge that Romney faces as he turns toward a general election campaign. Polls show Obama favored over Romney by about a 20-percentage-point margin among women, a gap posing a major electoral hurdle to Romney’s hopes of defeating Obama in November.

Ann Romney also responded to Rosen’s comment in an interview on FOX News, saying, “My career choice was to be a mother. Other women make other choices. We have to respect women in all the choices they make.”

She also disputed the notion that she doeesn’t understand the economy: “Guess what women are taking about. I don’t care if they’re stay-at-home mothers or working mothers or grandmothers. They’re talking about jobs and the legacy of debt that we are leaving our children.”

Ann Romney’s Role

Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, holds more than half the delegates needed for nomination at his party’s convention in August, and the withdrawal of rival Rick Santorum from the race earlier this week cleared the way for him to claim it.

Ann Romney has played an active role in her husband’s campaign, and Rosen’s comments elevated her profile at a time when the candidate is attempting to appeal to women.

Women account for a majority of voters in election years. Women also held a majority of non-farm payroll jobs in January 2010 -- for the first time since the U.S. Department of Labor started collecting data in 1964. The 2011 Bureau of Labor Statistics Databook on Women in the Labor Force reported that 71.3 percent of mothers with children were working.

Stay-Home Mothers

The challenge of Ann Romney’s experience as a stay-at-home mother reopens an issue that Hillary Clinton, now serving as Obama’s secretary of state, raised two decades ago when the wife of President Bill Clinton scoffed at the notion that she might have stayed home and baked cookies rather than having a career as a lawyer.

In a twist of political alliances, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina and adviser David Axelrod rose to the defense of the Republican candidate’s wife yesterday with Twitter messages calling Rosen’s words ”inappropriate” and “wrong.”

The exchange also capped Mitt Romney’s first full day as presumptive Republican nominee during which he made a direct appeal to women. Democrats have accused Republicans in their party’s primary contest of waging a ”war on women.”

Surrounded by dozens of female business-owners yesterday at a warehouse in Hartford, Romney said: “I was disappointed in listening to the president as he’s saying, ‘Oh, Republicans are waging a war on women.’ The real war on women is being waged by the president’s failed economic policies.”
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My thoughts are:
-Ann Romney isn't running for President.
-Very few Congressman have not undergone the economic plight that most Americans have faced. It doesn't mean they don't understand the econmics of it.
-I believe there is a war on women's constitutional rights - but it doesn't have to do with the financial aspects.

Hillary Rosen's response:
My Twitter feed was on fire after an appearance last night on CNN's AC360, where I said that I thought it was wrong for Mitt Romney to be using his wife as his guide to women's economic struggles when she "had never worked a day in her life." Oh my, you should read the tweets and the hate mail I got after that. The accusations were flying. I don't know what it means to be a mom (I have 2 children). I obviously don't value the work that a mother does and how hard it is (the hardest job I have ever had); and I absolutely hate anyone who doesn't have the same views as I do (hate is a strong word).

Spare me the faux anger from the right who view the issue of women's rights and advancement as a way to score political points. When it comes to supporting policies that would actually help women, their silence has been deafening. I don't need lectures from the RNC on supporting women and fighting to increase opportunities for women; I've been doing it my whole career. If they want to attack me and distract the public's attention away from their nominee's woeful record, it just demonstrates how much they just don't get it.

My favorite tweet was from someone who said that Republicans like Ann Romney so much more than Mitt that by attacking her (which I didn't), I got people to defend him in a way they never would.

That last one I can actually understand.

Now let's be clear on one thing. I have no judgements about women who work outside the home vs. women who work in the home raising a family. I admire women who can stay home and raise their kids full-time. I even envy them sometimes. It is a wonderful luxury to have the choice. But let's stipulate that it is NOT a choice that most women have in America today.

Why does this even matter? It matters purely because Mitt Romney put the issue of his wife's views squarely on the table.

As Ruth Marcus noted in her column yesterday in the Washington Post, Romney, when asked last week about the gender gap, twice said he wished his wife could take the question.

"My wife has the occasion, as you know, to campaign on her own and also with me," Romney told newspaper editors, "and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy."

So it begs the question, is Ann Romney Mitt's touchstone for women who are struggling economically or not? Nothing in Ann Romney's history as we have heard it -- hardworking mom she may have been -- leads me to believe that Mitt has chosen the right expert to get feedback on this problem he professes to be so concerned about.

I have nothing against Ann Romney. She seems like a nice lady who has raised nice boys, struggled with illness, and handles its long-term effects with grace and dignity. I admire her grit in talking about her illness publicly.

What is more important to me and 57% of current women voters is her husband saying he supports women's economic issue because they are the only issues that matter to us and then he fails on even those.

Let's put aside for a moment his views on women's health issues -- such as his pledge to repeal funding for Planned Parenthood or repeal title X -- which provides important health services for poor women, and true anecdotes (such as when he was a Bishop in his church, he actually went to a congregant's hospital room and told a young single mother who had just given birth that she was shaming the church and should give her baby away). Let's put those issues of respect and health dignity away.

Let's just focus on his economic record on behalf of women. When Romney ran Bain Capital, less than 10% of the senior workforce were women. And he said in his 1994 Senate race that it was because he had trouble finding qualified women to be executives. Is there a woman alive who believes that? I personally believe that women hate the way our health issues were made a political football by the Republicans in the last several months. But I am pragmatic enough to believe that the economic issues do matter greatly to women and men alike. But the only way that Mitt Romney will succeed in closing the wide gender gap between him and President Obama is if he stops pretending that it doesn't exist.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hilary-rosen/ann-romney-women_b_1419480.html

Message edited 4/13/2012 2:57:28 PM.

Posted 4/12/12 3:37 PM