Romney's Pearls of Wisdom

If the fear of seeing Mitt Romney ascend to the White House didn’t make our hearts contract, we would laugh along with the blogosphere, which is thoroughly enjoying Mitt’s remarks on women during his debate with Barack Obama. A little like those who say they’re not racist because they know a foreigner, Romney wanted people to believe that he was on women’s side while he was Massachusetts’ governor — which wasn’t the case, but we’ll get back to that. With the air of pulling something out of his hat, Romney thus declared that he had “binders full of women.” In a nanosecond the phrase became a cult hit.

Still living in 1952, poor Romney came out with one of the most bizarre explanations that has ever been heard during a political campaign. Affirming that he had been shocked by the lack of women higher up in his administration, he had turned to women’s organizations so that they could inform him of qualified women for the job. As a result of his inquest, Romney thus received “binders full of women.”

Tumblr instantly published a series of parodies, Twitter opened an account called @Romney_binders which counts, at press time, close to 15,000 followers. The Facebook page created minutes following this pearl of wisdom has more than 200,000 “likes.” This binder risks weighing Romney down like a millstone.

Why? Because behind this rhetoric that bears witness so well to the Republican’s lack of awareness, there’s reality. First, it wasn’t Mitt who contacted the women’s organizations but the contrary: they had organized well before his arrival as state governor to take an account of women who could apply for high positions in the administration. Afterwards, the number of women in high positions declined during Romney’s administration, according to a study by the University of Massachusetts. In Bain, which Romney directed for 15 years, there were only seven women out of 87 senior executive positions, or eight percent according to Bloomberg Business Week.

Of course, Romney wants to ally himself with women even though he proposed to cut funds to Planned Parenthood, the family planning center which gives aid to women in need, not only contraception but also cervical cancer screening, mammograms, etc.

To conclude, Romney recounted a story (to show that he’s always supportive of women) about his chief of staff who had two very young children and thus couldn’t stay at work until seven or eight at night because she had to go home and take care of her children and prepare dinner. As in 1952, a woman’s only job was to make dinner and take care of her children. Welcome to the time machine.