Sunday, March 22, 2015

Is Hillary Ready for the GOP "War on Women"?


Even before she has publicly announced her bit for president, the GOP has been trotting out slurs and conspiracy theories that drag back to the 1990's.  While those story lines continue to play well among the Kool-Aid drinking set that is today's GOP base, out in the reality based world, they don't play nearly so well.  Indeed, many simply yawn at the continued batshitery from the GOP. Where the GOP needs to tread carefully, however, in the view of a number of political consultants is how they treat Hillary in the context of their war on women - a war fueled by the demands of the Christofascists in the party base that are obsessed with womb control although they don't give a damn about children after they are born. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the issue.  Here are excerpts:
[W]hat the GOP hasn’t figured out how to tackle yet is something that may be even more important than Clinton’s record: the fact that if elected, she would at last break that glass ceiling and become the nation’s first female president.

Until this week, both Democrats and Republicans have been approaching the subject warily. For the GOP, anything approaching gender politics is fraught with peril. In 2012, their hopes of retaking the Senate were doomed when candidates on the campaign trail mused aloud about “legitimate rape” and whether children conceived from sexual assault were divinely sent.

For Democrats, the election season to keep in mind has been not 2012 but 2014, when their turbo-charging of rhetoric over the GOP’s “War on Women” led to charges of pandering. . . . But no more. This week, just as the uproar over her deleted State Department emails was growing deafening, Clinton took to Twitter to blast Republicans over a sex trafficking bill that included abortion provisions, and for their delays in approving the nomination of Loretta Lynch for attorney general, calling the moves “the Congressional trifecta against women.” 

In the last month Clinton, has appeared at a gala for Emily’s List, released a report through the Clinton foundation about women and global leadership, and spoken at a United Nations conference on the status of women and girls worldwide.

In Washington, D.C, meanwhile, Concerned Women for American—a religious counter to the liberal National Organization for Women—convened a number of top Republican female leaders to declare the “war on women” officially over.

“What do most women do every week? Do they fill up the gas tank and the grocery cart?” asked GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway. “Or do they get an abortion?”

Women make up a majority of voters. In 2012, in the wake of a series of Republican efforts to limit reproductive health access and the aforementioned campaign gaffes, Barack Obama racked up an 11-point victory over Mitt Romney . . .

Democrats, meanwhile, say that they don’t much have to bring up Clinton’s gender—they are confident that Republicans will do it for them, more often than not in boneheaded ways that end up driving female voters their way.

Democrats have built a vast infrastructure around monitoring media for just such kind of GOP outburst, and will be on hair-trigger alert for any statement made on the campaign trail or on cable news that could be construed as sexist toward Clinton. On Thursday, there was already a taste of what the next 20 months could be like when an email that an aide to Rick Perry’s SuperPAC wrote in 2011 in which he questioned whether a female head of state would be in “God’s will” made the rounds on social media.

The aide backtracked from the comments, but Clinton has been such a steady target of boorish commentary by conservative men that many Democrats are already preparing to pounce.

Republicans, said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, will find themselves in a few months “competing for a very small percentage of the vote that really dislikes Hillary. And those kind of over-the top comments are more likely to get made and they can be very damaging. It’s exactly that kind of thing that will reignite the ‘War on Women.’”

I tend to agree - I cannot see the loons of the far right not providing the Democrats with lots of fodder.  I also hope that staff at closed door GOP function s record some of the choice remarks that will be made when they the knuckle draggers think the media isn't listening.  Can you really see someone like Ted Cruz holding his tongue?

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