The Nation: Why Hilary Rosen Is Right

Friday, April 13, 2012

The Nation: Why Hilary Rosen Is Right

For most of today, the homepage of Fox News has featured a huge picture of the Romney family with the headline: “5 Kids, 16 Grandkids, and Dem Adviser Charges Ann Romney Has ‘Never Worked a Day in Her Life.’ ” The outrage, which has spanned across mainstream media, Twitter, Facebook and beyond, is over Hilary Rosen’s comments to Anderson Cooper yesterday that Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, has “never worked a day in her life.”

There’s no doubt that Rosen, a CNN contributor and Democratic political consultant, made a gaffe in providing such a juicy sound bite. But her message — in context — was right on.

Rosen was responding to Mitt Romney’s constant trotting out of Ann when he gets a question on women’s issues:

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.

Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we — why do we worry about their future?

There’s nothing there about stay-at-home moms, or the idea that that raising children isn’t work. Rosen was referring to the fact that Ann Romney — an incredibly rich and elite woman — likely does not understand the economic concerns of most American women. Again, it was unfortunate choice of words — but she wasn’t wrong.

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