We seem to be in a theater of the absurd. First, it was Romney’s dog on the top of his car. A couple of weeks ago the cry was “Save Big Bird.” Now Romney is condescending to women because he talked about seeking out women to fill some of his cabinet posts when he was governor of Massachusetts and as he collected resumés, he said he had a binder full of women. How awful! How insensitive! Actually, how surreal that anyone would make a big deal of this. He obviously meant a binder full of women’s resumés from which to choose the best to serve in his administration. The whole point of his comment at the debate was to show how eager he was to give key, responsible positions to women who have demonstrated their competence. Somehow, the Left seeks to turn this into a scandal of monstrous proportions.
Guy Benson, a commentator at Townhall, believes this “may represent the pettiest and most trivial chapter of this entire campaign.” He thinks it shows the kind of desperation that emanates from a campaign that is beginning to panic. He continues,
As a person who enjoys at least a modicum of brain activity, I’m not exactly sure how to react to this. It’s so trifling, so frivolous that it shouldn’t merit any discussion whatsoever. But here we are. The leader of the free world and his campaign have decided to elevate it as an issue.
I know why. Some new polls are showing Romney closing the gap for the women’s vote. In some states, he has overtaken Obama for the allegiance of women voters. Democrats thought they had that wrapped up, what with their “war on women” theme. Now they are running scared. Apparently all they can think to do is to be ridiculous and hope it somehow resonates. Well, it is resonating all right, but not in the way they hoped:
So many things seem to be going wrong for them all at once. Rumors are now swirling that they are thinking seriously of shifting funds away from states like Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, seeing them as trending Romney and unlikely to reverse direction in the last two weeks of the campaign. And the Libya situation is the albatross that seems to keep growing. As I mentioned yesterday, when asked at the debate about the security problems at the consulate, he didn’t answer, but instead went into a diatribe of accusation: how could anyone think he and his people would ever politicize the murder of diplomatic personnel? He was absolutely indignant over the suggestion. Yet to many, there is a sneaking suspicion—which is becoming less sneaking and more than a mere suspicion—that politics rules even in a tragedy like that:
I must return also to the vice presidential debate. I’ve already chronicled some of Joe Biden’s most hilarious moments that evening, but there was one I apparently missed. I remember hearing it in the background while I was reading commentary on the computer, but it didn’t hit me at the time that he said Syria was five times larger than Libya. Hmmm.
This comedy of errors represents the executive branch of our government. But it doesn’t have to much longer:
