DownWithTyranny!: In Willard's world, says Amy Davidson, women always seem to be missing where you expect them and to turn up where you don't

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"Romney was fifty-six when he became governor, with decades spent in business during which he could have made the sort of contacts that would have turned him into a resource for others looking for qualified women."

-- Amy Davidson, in her newyorker.com blogpost
today, "Mitt's Binders and the Missing Women"

by Ken

It could be that Republican presidential candidate Willard Inc. isn't really clueless but merely plays clueless in his, you know, presidential campaign.

Poor Willard is encountering concentrated hanging driblets of grief for that peculiar debate reference to "bindersful of women" (that's how I would spell "bindersful," anyway -- as the plural of a unit of measurement for an unknown but presumably sizable quantity of women). I think this is unfair, when he made it so clear that he thinks of bindersful of women a good thing -- in the same way that he considers bindersful of anything a good thing.

It's like the unfortunate misunderstanding of would be Sen. Todd Akin over that "legitimate rape" business, when it was clear that he didn't mean there's such a thing as "legal" rape but was only trying to distinguish real rapes -- you know, the occasional "forcible" kind that can be, well, legitimately classified as an honest-to-gosh rape, and not to be confused with all those other phony-baloney-type rapes, which is when those damned uppity-bitch wimmins lead good mens on and then afterwards cry rape.

Is that really so hard to understand?

Sort of the same thing with Willard's binders. Remember, Willard is a person, or corporate entity, that believes not so much that corproations should have the rights of people but that people, if they're really deserving, might be allowed the rigths of corporations. Now we have this wonderful binder image to flesh out the image our boy carries around in his head. If you can put it in a binder, he seems to be telling us, it's real, it's legitimate.

From such understanding as I've been able to piece together of the view from inside Willard's brain, this strikes me as eminently sensible. However, The New Yorker's Amy Davidson came away with an interestingly less forgiving take on where and how Willard sees them wimmins, in a blogpost today called "Mitt's Binders and the Missing Women."

One of the stories that Romney's campaign has told to humanize him is about how, at Bain Capital, he once shut down the office to lead a search for the daughter of a partner after she had gone missing in New York. When he talked, on Tuesday night, about how he had "the chance to pull together a cabinet" as the governor of Massachusetts and wanted to add women, the imagery was similar, and the targets also maddeningly elusive: "all the applicants seemed to be men," he explained. It was as if the women were runaways, deliberately hiding themselves:

And I -- and I went to my staff, and I said, how come all the people for these jobs are -- are all men? They said, well, these are the people that have the qualifications. And I said, well, gosh, can't we -- can't we find some -- some women that are also qualified?
And so off they set. Romney did not say if his staff members were all men, but they became determined pursuers of mystery women -- "we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet"; "I brought us whole binders full of -- of women." "Binders full of women" is a phrase that provoked instant fascination, because it is so strange, and, as a prop and a concept, so vivid. One saw a table at which middle-aged men sat slowly leafing through pages of plastic sleeves with photographs of women tucked inside. Or, more concretely, trapped between covers, battling with metal rings.

One got the sense of Mitt Romney coming from a place where women were generally in the other room, waiting to be invited in only when the moment -- or the visibility of the job -- called for it. Romney was fifty-six when he became governor, with decades spent in business during which he could have made the sort of contacts that would have turned him into a resource for others looking for qualified women. The Boston Globe pointed out that Romney "did not have any women partners as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s." Where were the binders then? The Globe added that even today, only four of Bain's forty-nine partners are women. This is a firm he built and a culture he controlled.

Amy adds this parenthetical note about Willard & Co.'s binders and the search for the missing wimmins.

The story, according to the Boston Phoenix, was also not quite true. An outside group put together the binder. Romney didn't put women in the most important cabinet jobs. And he had fewer and fewer working for him as time went on.

Oops!

Amy also points out that when Willard actually talked, or tried to talk, about the subject of the question, which was about the inequality of pay for comparable jobs between men and women, he went straight to talking about women wanting to leave the office early to make dinner. Amy agrees with the candidate that employers should help women by making schedules more flexible, but notes:

it is striking that, given an opening to talk about women in the workforce, Romney described people who either had to be dragged on to the stage or would run off of it as soon as they could. They start as a rumor and end up as an echo.