New York Times columnist Charles Blow once hyperventilated on The Grey Lady’s pages about the notion that “any women” could vote Republican. He quoted the vacuous comments of Todd Akin and the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson — is that a household name in your home? — and typical of commentators who use extreme anecdotes in the pursuit of thoughtfulness, he presented them as mainstream elements of the Right.
“This brings me back to my original question: why do women vote Republican?” he asked at the column’s conclusion.
He never got around to answering, leaving it open-ended — almost as if to say, “Really?”
Republican Senate candidate Terri Lynn Land of Michigan is saying the same thing, though from a decidedly different point of view. Land, who is challenging Democratic Rep. Gary Peters to replace the retiring Sen. Carl Levin, is out with a new advertisement that effortlessly backhands the Left for implying that she is a combatant against her own gender.
“Congressman Gary Peters and his buddies want you to believe I’m waging a war on women. Really? Think about that for a moment.”
She gives the viewer all the time he or she needs, sipping from a coffee mug in silence as elevator music plays in the background for several seconds. She stares into the camera and shakes her head. She’s said all she needs to say.
And she has a point.
One of the most demeaning aspects of the Democrats’ ‘War on Women’ narrative is that it presumes female Republicans are illogical. By broadly casting the center-right party as the enemy of 51 percent of the country — women, many of whom identify with the GOP — Democrats imply that Republican women are at war against themselves.
Other factions of the Left have argued that women supporting the GOP are ill-informed, or perhaps idiotic. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright asked, “I can’t understand why any woman would want to vote for Mitt Romney, except maybe Mrs. Romney.” Katha Pollitt incredulously asked the same in The Nation.
“Do they have Stockholm syndrome?” she wrote of female Romney/Ryan backers. “Ladies, I doubt you read The Nation, but I’m going to say it anyway: The Republican Party is not your friend!”
In the everlasting words of Jeffrey Lebowski, “Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man,” one not shared by people like Ms. Land.
