Mitt Romney has an uphill battle. Unseating a seated president is difficult for any candidate. The snake you know is always better than the snake you don’t. Plus, Mitt is GOP in 2012.
A new Washington Post poll is out showing Obama ahead in the the swing state of Virginia 51% to 44%. It’s the fifth swing state poll in just a few days (the other four being OH, WI, FL, and PA), and it looks as though Mitt has a lot of work to do before he can even lose respectably. If he half-asses it, he’s going to get stomped like a narc at a biker rally.
If you look closer at these polls like I did (being the severely bored person I am), you’ll see that the GOP’s problem is women. Yep, the GOP has a problem with women, what with their pesky demand for having control over their own bodies and their annoying habit of voting.
In Virgina, the Transvaginal Ultrasound Fiasco (TUF) didn’t help matters at all. In case you don’t know, the transvaginal ultrasound is where a woman who is considering an abortion must, by law, spread her legs and have her vagina invaded with an ultrasound device to show her the “baby” she is thinking about “killing”. State-mandated medical rape, in other words.
Weirdly, this brilliant piece of GOP thinking pissed off a whole bunch of women and even some men, who actually sat down their beers and looked up from the game, cocking a collective eyebrow of concern. The Republicans, seeing the anger, backed off, saying, “Maybe forcing a woman to spread her legs and invading her vagina is a bad idea, especially if it makes a lot of people not want to vote for us.”
But the damage was done. By and large, women don’t like the GOP these days, and it’s reflected in poll after poll.
America is generally a pretty conservative place, but the Republican Party of 2012 has gone overboard. The extremism of Fox News is actually driving the debate for the GOP, much to it and Romney’s detriment.
Over the last few years, Republicans have worked at every level of government to roll back, limit, or outright kill just about every advance feminism has made for this country. There are even those that would turn us into a Christian Saudi Arabia. Just last month, a preacher was lamenting the fact that women had the right to vote. He called it a mistake. Women’s Suffrage, he says, is a mistake. You probably heard about it. If not, his name is Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson and he appears, not surprisingly, on Fox News’ Hannity quite a bit. In fact, Sean Hannity sits on the advisory board of Peterson’s little He-Man Woman Haters Club. Called, inelegantly, the Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, it is no doubt located in a 1930s treehouse.
All of this has hurt the GOP’s standing with women far more deeply than it would like to admit. It has only played well with a core group of evangelicals who don’t have the numbers to run this country, but who feel they have the god-given right.
Anyway, President Obama sends his thanks.
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