The latest Republican ladies' outreach effort tops all previous Republican ladies' outreach efforts. For sheer awfulness, that is. I mean, holy crap this is terrible, condescending stuff:
In 2008, I fell in love. His online profile made him seem so perfect: smart, handsome, charming, articulate, all the right values. I trusted him. But by 2012, our relationship was in trouble, but I stuck with it, because he promised he'd be better. He's great at promises.
He, of course, is Barack Obama. Because that's how women see politics—we're just looking to vote for a handsome, charming boyfriend figure. And apparently the boyfriend we now need to dump "thinks the only thing I care about is free birth control." So, are the Paycheck Fairness Act, the minimum wage, affordable health care, and workplace discrimination just men's issues, or are we pretending they don't exist?
Would it shock you to hear that this ad, along with another even more heavily focused on the "free birth control" angle, is being run by a man ("John Jordan, a California winery owner and head of the group Americans for Shared Prosperity") and was made by another man? And also, this:
One GOP strategist who worked in the 2012 campaign and with the Republican National Committee pointed out that the spot is very similar to a Web ad the Republican National Committee did in 2012 called “The Breakup.”
“It worked well on digital, but it never moved numbers to justify it on broadcast, as it wasn’t giving any information to voters to move them,” the strategist said. “The ads that the Romney campaign ran focused more on economic issues for women was the obvious stuff that tested well.”
That's right, this approach didn't live up to the Romney campaign's exacting standards for ladies' outreach. The good news is, Republican money is being spent on this ad that, at best, "isn't giving any information to voters to move them." And more likely it's turning women off, because again, holy crap, could it be any more condescending? The only way this could be more obviously a male fantasy about how women think is if the woman in the ad was wearing a lace nightie and tying cherry stems into knots with her tongue in between sentences.
