Last week's attempt by the GOP to woo women with a message that boiled down to "Elections are like shopping for wedding dresses, little lady" went over like a lead balloon, but today they are back with a new web ad trying to position the GOP as the party for women by featuring several female Republican candidates into a single ad.
The message: Republicans are the party of women because a handful of the GOP has a handful of female candidates. Not exactly a powerful message, but when you consider the positions supported by the candidates on the list, you can see why they'd rather focus on their chromosomes than what they stand for:
- Monica Wehby: Wehby might be a female doctor, but she nonetheless supported the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision which sought to restrict women's access to birth control.
- Elise Stefanik: Stefanik isn't just "anti-abortion," she's a hardcore anti-choice proponent endorsed by the ultra-right Susan B. Anthony list.
- Shelley Moore Capito: Capito has in the past supported raising the minimum wage, but when it came up for a vote in 2013, she voted against raising it—a vote that disproportionately hurt women, who are two-thirds of minimum wage workers.
- Mia Love: Like Stefanik, Love is endorsed by ultra-right anti-choice activists.
- Susana Martinez: Remember Todd Akin? Well, Martinez announced a requirement that female victims of sexual assault must prove they were "forcibly raped" to receive childcare assistance.
- Marilinda Garcia: One of the great things about Obamacare is that it guarantees that women do not have to pay more for health care simply by virtue of the fact that they are women. Garcia, who is backed by Ted Cruz, not only supports repealing Obamacare, but she won't say whether she personally gets is covered by it ... which pretty much means she is.
- Terri Lynn Land: Land famously tried to argue that the fact that she is a woman proves that the idea that the GOP has a "War on Women" is absurd, making her case in an ad which featured her staring silently at the camera for 12 solid seconds. Of course, that isn't all she was silent about: She also refused to stand up for fair pay, the minimum wage, or Obamacare's ban health insurers treating being a woman as a preexisting condition.
- Martha McSally: You may have heard about McSally because she's the candidate supported letting stalkers get guns until Gabby Giffords challenged her with a television ad. McSally may have flip-flopped to the right position when she didn't have any choice, but her first instincts was to protect stalker gun rights, not at-risk women.
- Joni Ernst: Ernst isn't just a candidate who has called Obama a dictator and suggested impeaching him, she's also a candidate who has argued that there shouldn't be a Federal minimum wage at all. That would hurt men and women, but especially women, who represent two-thirds of minimum wage earners. Like all the other women, she's also 100 percent against Obamacare, which not only guarantees that women don't have to pay more than men for health care, but also provides coverage to families and children of families, something that even Republicans should recognize is important to women across the country.
Bottom line: Someday, Republicans might realize that their problems with women run deeper than whether or not they run ads featuring women—that policies matter. Today, however, is clearly not that day.
Republicans in Congress and at the state level have been waging a War on Women—restricting women's healthcare choices, defunding Planned Parenthood, blocking equal pay bills, and more. Can you chip in $5 to elect Democratic women up and down the ballot?
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