Dear Governor Romney:
This is an open note to you from a voter. I write on behalf of myself and my mother.
Governor Romney, please take a moment to get acquainted with your worst nightmare: educated, middle-class, middle-aged women. There are millions of us. We vote, we work, we fundraise; we have lots of friends who vote; we phone, we canvass, we persuade – and we will not be voting for you in November. And let me tell you another thing – neither will our mothers.
Those of us (and I count myself among them) who voted (and canvassed and fundraised and persuaded) for President Obama enthusiastically in 2008 will be doing so again. We made a difference in 2008 and we will be making a difference again in 2012. And it won’t be to your benefit.
But let me tell you something else. Some of our mothers may have been on the fence in 2008. Some were loyal members of the GOP. And some of them peeled off for President Obama in 2008 because of (a) their utter disgust with the feckless, economy-destroying, warmongering policies of George W. Bush and/or (b) their utter disgust with John McCain’s decision to put the catastrophically unqualified Sarah Palin in line to lead this country.
But, Mr. Romney, you’ve upped the stakes even with them – because now you are threatening their daughters. Mama Grizzlies have nothing on aging senior women who fought so hard to give their daughters a chance at equality and self-sufficiency and a fair paycheck – and are now watching you (and your standard bearer of middle class destruction, Paul Ryan) try to ensure that their daughters will be in the same boat their Depression era parents would have been in had it not been for FDR.
You, Mr. Romney, are threatening the old age of much-loved middle-aged daughters who were the first in their families to go to college and law school and medical school and worked while raising families and care for their aging parents and have been SQUEEZED, despite working 18-hour days, by the recession and unemployment (of their husbands and children and themselves) and declining home values and skyrocketing college tuition. You and Mr. Ryan – as President Obama pointed out in his speech of April 3rd – want to rob those of us who will (or would) be eligible for Medicare and Social Security in 10 years of our right to have what we have paid for during the past four decades.
I am 55 years old, Mr. Romney. Yup, a member of Mr. Ryan’s class of 1957 – the first cohort who would (under his insidious, anti-American plan) be ineligible for Medicare as we know it. As you know – because you have endorsed his "marvelous" budget – people my age and older would get "vouchers" instead. I don’t want a voucher, thank you. I have paid into the system since 1974, when I spent the summer working (industriously, nine hours a day) as a file clerk on Wall Street. By 2022, when you would deny me the benefits I have earned, I will have been paying into the Medicare system for 48 years. For you to take MY money and basically turn it over to insurance companies would be, to me, nothing short of theft. You went to law school – explain it to me differently.
I am divorced. Everything I will have to retire on will be either money I earned and put away or money I paid into the system. I have been a diligent saver, but with the cost of health care what it is (and your party’s eagerness to undo the strides we made under the health care plan – modeled on YOURS in Massachusetts – that was passed by Congress), I figure that one serious illness will leave me with not much of anything. Mr. Romney – this makes my mother furious.
You and your party’s antediluvian positions on contraception, abortion and women’s health care (see above) in general also infuriate not only me and the women of my generation, but women in my mother’s generation as well.
I am old enough to remember when King’s County Hospital (Brooklyn – don’t even both campaigning there, by the way) regularly reserved beds in the ER for women who had suffered botched back-alley abortions and had infections or were bleeding to death. Your belief that you (or anyone) have any business interfering with a woman’s decision to complete or terminate a pregnancy (a Constitutional right) is anathema to me. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about your religious principles. Please save them for church, as I do. The United States still isn’t a theocracy, and I have every bit as much of a right to my views as you do to yours; they end where my body (or the bodies of other women who disagree with you) begins.
(Just noting for the record that my forebears were suffragists and abolitionists in the 19th century and that yes, their faith energized their efforts. But their efforts were to enable constitutional rights rather than to deny them, just as my faith energizes me to support marriage equality.)
And as for contraception – THAT was settled before you graduated from Harvard Law School. If "faith-based" organizations receiving public money or subsidies in the form of tax breaks don’t like laws that require them to treat women equally, they are completely free to forfeit those subsidies and tax breaks and do what they please. "Faith based" organizations are not people -- they don't have any more right to decide which laws they want to obey than does any other organization. Oh, and by the way, no one asked me whether I wanted to contribute my tax dollars to illegal, immoral and unnecessary wars.
You and your party, Mr. Romney, have no respect for me, or the women of my generation. You have no respect for the bravery of our mothers, who were feminists when being so was considered radical. And to be clear – that "radical" mother of mine, who has been ardently pro-choice for decades, is also a Navy widow, a retired Lutheran schoolteacher, and a former Republican. So don’t go there. But know, sir, that your embrace of the Ryan budget, which threatens the old age of her daughter, has made it certain not only that she will vote again for President Obama but that she will, again, be calling all of her friends and making sure they do the same. They have middle-aged daughters, too.
Finally, Mr. Romney, please do not think for one minute that trotting out surrogates like Nikki Haley is going to sway us.
Seriously? Women don’t care about contraception?
Um – yes, we do. We ALSO care about jobs and the economy and all other aspects of health care (and about the fact that nothing you have proposed would do anything to help create middle class jobs or boost the economy or make health care more affordable and accessible) – but we also know that one can care about more than one thing at a time. We do. We work and take care of families and aging parents and volunteer in our communities – all at the same time. It’s not an either/or, Mr. Romney. And for goodness sake (as you would say), don’t assume that we’ll believe your nonsense when it’s coming out of the mouth of a woman any more than we would believe it if you said it. We are not stupid.
We also know the effect your policies would have on our daughters. And we don't want them to suffer them, either.
We, Mr. Romney, will do everything we can to make sure that you are never President of the United States and we will also be doing everything we can to make sure that the current President of the United States is reelected. And so will our mothers. They may be in their 70s and 80s but they know truth when they see it.
And there is nothing you can say – and no one you can get to say it for you – that will convince us that you have any respect for us at all. We know who does -- and that is President Barack Obama.