Continuing his quest for every possible vote, President Obama is pitching female voters with claims that the bad economy and policies he’s enacted over the last two years have empowered women.
“The economy has changed where women have made such enormous strides that they now constitute fully half of the work force,” the president said during a campaign stop in Seattle Thursday.
Obama’s backyard campaign event on the theme of women and the economy — along with his campaign swing to aid Democratic female candidates in Washington and California — was timed to coincide with the release of a new White House report intended to show that Obama’s policies have benefited women.
Noting that women still lag behind men in compensation and occupy fewer upper-management slots, the administration is touting Obama’s nomination of two women to the Supreme Court and his signing of a fair-pay bill as evidence that women have benefited during his first two years in office.
The report, issued by the National Economic Council, noted progress under Obama in directing business loans, unemployment benefits, training tax credits and more to women, though many of those same benefits are also available to men.
Still, Obama said the recession job losses have hit men hardest, while creating more opportunities for women.
“When you talk about what’s happened to the middle class, part of what you’re talking about is what’s happening to women in the work force,” Obama said.
At the Nov. 2 midterm elections draw near, women are much on the minds of Democratic leaders, as they have been in previous cycles when “soccer moms” and “security moms” were the demographic rage.
Women have historically favored Democrats, but they are split between the two parties this year, a Gallup poll shows. Currently, 49 percent of women who are likely to vote are leaning toward Republican candidates, compared with 46 percent who are supporting Democrats, the poll shows.
At the same time, Gallup found women are largely disengaged from next month’s election, with just 31 percent saying they have given some thought to the midterms, compared with 45 percent of men who said so.
Obama in 2008 won 55 percent of the women’s vote, and their subsequent drift away from him over the last two years is worrisome for Democrats, who face the prospect of losing control of the House and some seats in the Senate next month.
The president on Thursday took some of the blame for failing to better communicate how his policies help women and other groups.
“Our attitude was we just had to get the policy right, and we did not always think about making sure we were advertising properly what was going on,” Obama said at the Seattle event.
The president is currently on a four-day, five-state campaign swing to help Democrats out west, including Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, both of whom are caught in tight re-election contests.
The outreach to women is part of a larger strategy targeting minorities, young voters and other groups that backed Obama in 2008 but who, according to polls, have grown increasingly disenchanted with the president and Democratic congressional leaders.
Even so, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs denied that the economic council’s report was directly linked to Obama’s campaign outreach to women.
“The timing isn’t political,” Gibbs said. The economy is “an issue that obviously is on everybody’s mind.”
