/ 18 October 2012

Romney’s latest gaffe weighs on push for women’s votes

Republican hopeful Mitt Romney.
Republican hopeful Mitt Romney.

The furore threatened to complicate the Republican candidate's push for an important segment of the electorate and offered US President Barack Obama a boost as he sought to stem Romney's recent polling surge ahead of the November 6 election.

It was Obama who touched off the skirmish after drawing Romney into a row during the pair's heated debate on Tuesday on Long Island, New York, by making a fervent push for female votes.

A day later, the president delighted in ridiculing Romney's comeback that he reviewed "whole binders full of women" when choosing his Cabinet as governor of Massachusetts.

"We don't have to order up some binders to find talented, qualified young women, to learn, to teach," Obama said, before a 14 000-strong crowd, many of them female, under fall foliage at Ohio University in Athens.

Romney's oddball phrase took on a life of its own, trending on Twitter and inspiring a "Binders Full of Women" Facebook page which drew 330 000 "likes".

Someone rustled up a blog – Bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com – for fan art mocking the phrase, which some critics said smacked of an antiquated view of females in the workplace and treated women as a commodity.

Wading into mockery
One picture showed two white binders with the words, "Binder full of women. If found please return to Mitt Romney."

Another featured a shot of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying: "No one puts me in a binder, I work for the president."

Vice-President Joe Biden also waded into the mockery.

"Whoa! The idea that he had to go and ask where a qualified woman was, he just should have come to my house. He didn't need a binder."

Obama and Biden were keen to jump on Romney's embarrassment because it offered them an opening to court the women's vote following several recent polls suggesting their advantage in the so-called gender gap was fraying.

The president beat Republican John McCain among women by 13 points in 2008, and in what is shaping up as an even closer election this time, may need an even wider gender gap to be safe.

Romney himself wasted no time courting female voters on Wednesday. "This president has failed America's women," he told a rally in Virginia.

Radical audience
As he criss-crosses the nation, women ask him to bring down unemployment, improve schools and provide their children with better job prospects, Romney said.

"That's what the women of America are concerned about. And the answers are coming from us and not Barack Obama."

Obama's attacks built on Democratic assaults on Romney earlier this year when he highlighted conservative positions on abortion to court the more radical audience of the Republican Party primary.

The president's senior advisor David Plouffe said women's issues were going to become "increasingly important" in the dying days of the race, as both campaigns seek to drive up margins with core voters.

A USA/Today Gallup poll caused a stir this week because it found that Obama only led Romney by 1% among likely female voters in swing states, after having a wide lead earlier this year.

Obama's campaign disputed the poll methodology and said it was flagrantly inconsistent with surveys across the country.

Romney's political director Rich Beeson argued there was significant movement towards the Republican ticket among women.

Whatever the state of play, experts say votes of women in suburban areas in places like Colorado and Virginia have the potential to sway whole state races which could help decide who wins the White House.

Women's rights
Obama, who wore a pink breast cancer support bracelet on Wednesday, did not confine his attacks on Romney to women in the workplace. He accused the Republican in the debate of wanting to curtail women's rights to contraception, a charge Romney denies.

The president has also lacerated Romney over whether he would support the first Bill he signed as president, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which makes it easier for women to sue to get equal pay to men.

"I have got two daughters, I don't want them paid less than a man who is doing the same job," Obama said in Athens.

Romney in the debate refused to say whether he would have signed the Bill, though he did suggest he wouldn't change it.

As controversy raged on Wednesday, Romney's former lieutenant governor Kerry Healey sent around a fundraising email offering him strong support.

"When Mitt Romney talks about women, when he says he believes that we can do any job a man can do, I know from experience that he's speaking from the heart," Healey said.

"In fact, of the 20 top positions in the Romney administration, 10 of them were filled by women, more than any other state in the nation." – Sapa-AFP