Republican politicians really try. They try so hard not to say what they really think about women, about Hispanics, about African-Americans, about teachers, about any one of the disparate Democratic-leaning subgroups they've demonized for the last thirty-odd years.
But a good number of them just can't keep their mouths shut. There's an irresistible compulsion that builds up inside of them until it's just too much to keep in--and a stream of unmitigated contempt spews forth out of them like a rope of vomit, leaving a mess no one wants to acknowledge, let alone clean up. Nowhere does this tendency manifest itself more than when they are losing an election.
Jeff Bell, running against incumbent Senator Cory Booker in New Jersey, is a Republican losing an election. And he's figured out why.
"I've done a lot of thinking about this and looked at a lot of different polls, I think it has more to do with the rise in single women," Bell told the Asbury Park Press. "Single mothers particularly are automatically Democratic because of the benefits. They need benefits to survive, and so that kind of weds them to the Democratic Party.
"But single women who have never married and don't have children are also that way," he continued. "If you take married women, they aren't that different from married men. So it's really a problem with the decline in marriage rates. The Democrats do benefit from that."
If you notice, Bell manages here to disparage single women who are also mothers, single women overall, and married women, all in one statement. He also insults African-American women, as there's little subtlety about the race codes embedded in his diatribe.
According to Bell, single moms vote Democratic because of government handouts ("benefits"). What such a "handout" might be, he doesn't specify, but it's apparently a handout that all childless single women get as well. Bell also seems to be saying that women won't be getting any of these handouts (whatever they are) from the Republican Party. Which is a rather odd message, since he acknowledges that these mysterious "benefits" are necessary for a woman's survival.
Bell's message to women here is to get married and get off the government dole. In Bell's curious world, once married, women are pretty much indistinguishable from men (men it seems are never on the dole). Of course, Bell is simply echoing the same "dependency" message that Mitt Romney espoused in his infamous 47% speech where he essentially wrote off half the country as lazy "takers." Steve Benen, writing for MSNBC, notes that nothing seems to have changed since 2012:
In the Republican’s mind, recipients of government benefits are necessarily “dependent,” which means voting Democratic “no matter what.” Reality, of course, tells a very different story, but the number of Republicans who continue to think this way has not faded.
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The similarities to the Romney remarks are quite striking. Of course, Romney thought he was speaking only to a group of wealthy donors behind closed doors, while Bell made his comments to a newspaper, on the record and focused specifically on women.
This isn't the first time the rabidly anti-choice Bell has weighed in with his
keen insight on women's issues:
Booker’s campaign has repeatedly highlighted Bell’s socially conservative views, issuing weekly “Throwback Thursday” press releases that include snippets from his previous books and columns, including one where he said the birth control pill had eroded women’s “social and psychological resistance to premarital sex.”
Polls have Cory Booker (who has called Bell's comments "delusional" and "misogynistic") well ahead in the Senate Race for the state of New Jersey. The same polls show a stark gender gap in favor of Booker. It's easy to understand
why, and it has nothing to do with "benefits:"
According to his website, Bell supports Rand Paul’s bill that would create fetal personhood; he also supports bans on abortion even in the case of rape or incest. Only 10 percent of New Jersey residents support a total ban on abortion.
Bell's problem with women mirrors that of the Republican Party nationally:
Throughout this election cycle, the Republican Party has struggled to reach female voters, especially unmarried ones. Unmarried women are more likely to support Democrats than Republicans; in 2012, 61 percent of unmarried women supported Obama, while 51 percent of married women voted for Romney. A report from two major Republican groups found that women consider the party to be “intolerant.”