Mitt the Jerk: a Woman’s View of the Debate (Amy Sullivan)

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/108711/mitt-the-jerk#

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But mostly, Mitt the Man interrupted and ignored the evening’s most prominent woman, moderator Candy Crowley of CNN. In one particularly uncomfortable exchange, Crowley attempted to get Romney to explain his arithmetic for massive-tax-cut + increased-defense-spending + closing-of-unspecified-tax-loopholes + cuts-to-PBS-and-Planned-Parenthood = lowered deficit. “If somehow when you get in , there isn’t enough tax revenue coming in, if somehow the numbers don’t add up,” asked Crowley, “would you be willing to look again at a 20 percent…” “Well, OF COURSE, they add up,” interrupted a visibly annoyed Romney. “I was someone who ran businesses for 25 years and balanced the budget. I ran the Olympics and balanced the budget. I ran the state of Massachusetts, to the extent any governor does, and balanced the budget all four years.”

The dismissive lecture Romney gave Crowley was devastating—but not in the way he intended. He defended his honor as a businessman, but at the cost of reminding undecided women of every man who ever made them feel stupid or who cut them down just to win an argument.

A popular theory to explain Romney’s rise in the polls over the past two weeks is that undecided women flocked to him after his performance in the first presidential debate. The Romney campaign certainly seems to think it has a good chance of winning over those voters—the candidate trotted out a new new position on abortion last week, and on Tuesday the campaign released a television ad casting Romney as a moderate on abortion and birth control issues. Romney made special mention of “women living in poverty” on Tuesday evening. And during the debate, Americans for Prosperity even tweeted one of my columns that criticized Obama for relying mostly on male senior advisors.

There are still three weeks before Election Day, when we’ll learn the size of the gender gap between the two candidates. But if those undecided women end up pulling the lever for Democrats, the Romney camp will end up wishing Mitt the Man had stayed out of sight.