The Republicans have spent the last four years fending off Democratic claims that they’re waging a “war on women.” Well, this weekend, one of the highest-profile Republican women in the House, Renee Ellmers (R-N. C.), inadvertently furnished more evidence that there is indeed a war on women. In Ellmers’ view, her party needs to bring its message “down to a woman’s level.” Apparently Ellmers thinks that women just aren’t smart enough to understand the issues otherwise.
On Friday, some of the more conservative women in the House sat down with a small group of conservative activists to discuss how they could improve the way Republican policies are sold to women. Most of them were members of the Republican Study Committee, the House’s original wingnut caucus. It didn’t get much notice in the press–indeed, the only journalist to get in the room was Ashe Schow of The Washington Examiner. Among the attendees was Ellmers, one of the higher-profile members of the Republican freshman class of 2010. She told her fellow panelists that her male colleagues “tend to talk about things on a much higher level” than women, with their use of pie charts and graphs. Ellmers thinks all that talk goes over the heads of most women. Her solution?
“We need our male colleagues to understand that if you can bring it down to a woman’s level and what everything that she is balancing in her life ? that’s the way to go.”
So that’s all it is, isn’t it? All this complex policy talk is just too much for the pretty little heads of women, so we just need to dumb everything down so they can understand it. There have been a lot of palpably sexist remarks made by conservative women over the years, but this has to be one of the worst.
In a burning statement issued earlier today, Ellmers accused Schow of writing a hit piece. She claimed her words had been “taken completely out of context,” and claimed Schow had taken an event where women were “laughing, bonding and sharing solutions” into “a dark place that does not exist.” The Examiner replied with an audio clip of Ellmers’ comments. Listen and judge for yourself.
Ellmers has frequently been put forward when the GOP wants a woman to talk about women’s issues–often with disastrous results. Last year, for instance, she appeared on CNN and made comments about Obamacare that were so outrageously false that several of her constituents slammed her on Facebook for embarrassing them. Despite this, she’s still the chairwoman of the Republican Women’s Policy Conference. Then again, consider that the other potential choices are people like Michele Bachmann, Virginia Foxx and Marsha Blackburn. Says a lot, doesn’t it?
This looks to be yet another example of what happens when politicians essentially draw districts for themselves. Ellmers, for those who don’t know, ousted seven-term incumbent Democrat Bob Etheridge in 2010–a campaign highlighted by two Republican strategists orchestrating a scene in which Etheridge grabbed one of them by the wrists. Her district was one of the few white-majority districts in the South that Obama won in 2008, with 52 percent of the vote. However, it was nicely shored up for her by the Republican-controlled General Assembly in the last round of redistricting. They turned it into a district John McCain would have won it with 57 percent of the vote under its current lines, essentially handing Ellmers another term. Former American Idol contestant Clay Aiken is challenging her on the Democratic side in the upcoming election, and actually outraised her in the second quarter. While it’s going to be really tough sledding for Aiken given the configuration of this district, one can hope that Ellmers is held to account for these outrageously sexist statements sooner or later.
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Edited/Published by JA
Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
