Details, please? I ended up feeling as if I knew Ann better than Mitt. But that’s a quibble, not a criticism. My real gripe was the campaign’s strategic decision to deliver two speeches in one: the humanizing, or attempted humanizing, of Mitt Romney, and the flagrant pitch to women. Ann Romney was perfectly positioned to accomplish the first. But on the second, she is a flawed messenger who delivered a ham-handed message.
On the messenger part, Ann Romney is not the campaign’s best emissary to women for the reasons that Hilary Rosen inartfully expressed several months ago, with her comments about Ann Romney having “never worked a day in her life.” It’s not her fault, but when Ann Romney talks about the struggles of “working moms who love their jobs but would like to work just a little less to spend more time with the kids,” the working moms the campaign is trying to woo might stop and think, “Gee, she never had that problem.” Tuna fish and pasta notwithstanding, the Romneys never were those “parents who lie awake at night side by side, wondering how they’ll be able to pay the mortgage or make the rent.”
Insulting to the guys
Then there was the unsubtlety of Ann Romney’s we-moms-get-it pander. “You’ll hear the women sighing a little bit more than the men. It’s how it is, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s the moms who have always had to work a little harder to make everything right. It’s the moms of this nation — single, married, widowed — who really hold this country together. We’re the mothers, we’re the wives, we’re the grandmothers, we’re the big sisters, we’re the little sisters, and we are the daughters. You know it’s true, don’t you? … You are the ones who always have to do a little more. … I’m not sure if men really understand this, but I don’t think there’s a woman in America who really expects her life to be easy. In our own ways, we all know better!”
This is kind of insulting to the guys, don’t you think? Surely there were some dads out there who “know the fastest route to the local emergency room” or spend a long day at work and then “come home at night and help with the book report, just because it has to be done.” Surely some dads also “know what it’s like to sit in that graduation ceremony and wonder how it was that so many long days turned into years that went by so quickly.” Surely a few of them were out there bristling. Maybe even a few of their wives.