Romney Loses Alabama Working Women To... Rick Santorum!

Pundits on TV Tuesday night seemed disconcerted that Santorum won among working women in Alabama. Unless you want to be disconcerted that any working women vote in a Republican primary-- virtually no African Americans do-- why bother wondering about this? I mean, by "working women," we're not talking about Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman or anyone from David Vitter's little black book. So if Republican women are voting their pocketbooks... clearly Mitt Romney with his Swiss bank account and Cayman Islands tax shelters and agenda for laying off as many people as possible isn't all that palatable. And "moderate" on women's issues? That's not how he was marketing himself in Alabama and Mississippi last week.


Romney's utter lack of authenticity went beyond his off-putting (to say the least) awkwardness with human beings. He doesn't just come across as an alien because of a fake southern accent or because of his attempts talk about how much he loves eatin' "cheesy grits." He comes across as someone with no moral compass when he flip-flops so deviously and so frequently on virtually everything, including, of course, women's health.

To compete with radical right extremists like Santorum and Gingrich and to try to please people like this (the non-Wall Street heart of the Republican Party base, as opposed to the ones with a full set of teeth in their faces), Romney has to contort himself into positions that normal Americans (so not the ones at that link) just cannot abide. And that includes women, even Republican working women in Alabama! He has even been on record in favor of eliminating all Title X family planning (which also pays for cancer screenings, etc), not just that funding which goes to Planned Parenthood. Women may have noticed that he came out in favor of the concerted Republican Party effort to get rid of Title X when it almost shut down the government, something women are particularly opposed to seeing happen. Tuesday night Rachel Maddow looked not just at Romney's general messaging dilemma, but specifically at his Planned Parenthood dilemma. The whole video is good but she gets to the point at the 4 minute mark:



He believes in Roe v Wade, he told voters over and over and over. He even donated his own personal money to Planned Parenthood and attended at least one of their fundraisers himself. Now he's trying to out-extreme people in his own party who have made lifelong careers out of bigotry, hatred and insanity. He comes across as crass and insincere and, as always... alien. "Astonishingly dishonest!" is how Maddow termed it.