August 22, 2012 by mhasegawa

Akin, Ryan, Romney and Women’s Healthcare

I was cooking dinner and listening to a rerun of Tom Ashbrook’s On Point when I heard Mary Kate Cary say that she agreed with the President that rape was rape, but did not agree with him that male legislators were making health care decisions for women and that they should just let women decide for themselves. The President’s exact words from a report from CBS News

“Rape is rape,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the daily White House briefing Monday. “And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me.”

Mr. Obama added that Akin’s remarks underscore “why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women.”

The president acknowledged that his GOP rival Mitt Romney and other Republicans have distanced themselves from Akin’s statements. However, he said, “The underlying notion that we should be making decisions on behalf of women for their health care decisions, or qualifying ‘forcible rape’ versus ‘non-forcible rape’ — those are broader issues….between me and the other party.”

Mary Kate Cary, a former speech writer for President George H. W. Bush, went on to confuse the fact that women probably do make more decisions about health care treatment than men since they are still most likely to take the children to the doctor, with the male legislators setting boundaries on what kind of treatment women can actually choose. (Thanks to my husband for helping me clarify that.)

So what does all this mean? It means that Todd Akin, Paul Ryan and the Republican platform are imposing their religious ideas on everyone and removing choice. And here I thought that they were the party of small government! What with banning abortion in all situations and/or requiring vaginal ultrasounds before an abortion, I think they are actually intruding in health care decisions. At the same time, none of them cares about what happens to the child after this forced birth because there will be no available safety net for her or for her mother under the Ryan/Romney cuts to the safety net in the budget combined with the proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act. There will also be no way for women to prevent pregnancies as there will be no contraception available under the ACA and no funding for Planned Parenthood.

Todd Akin and all his pals who don’t believe that a woman can get pregnant during rape, make that forcible rape, may be on the extreme edge of an extreme edge but they do represent the majority view of the Republican party. This from the New York Times this morning

As an orator, Representative Todd Akin of Missouri may stand out for his clumsiness. But as a legislator, Mr. Akin has a record on abortion that is largely indistinguishable from those of most of his Republican House colleagues, who have viewed restricting abortion rights as one of their top priorities.

It is an agenda that has enjoyed the support of House leaders, including Speaker John A. Boehner and Representative Eric Cantor, the majority leader, who has called anti-abortion measures “obviously very important in terms of the priorities we set out initially in our pledge to America.” It became inextricably linked to the near-shutdown of the federal government last year when an agreement to keep the government open was reached only after it was linked to a measure restricting abortion in the District of Columbia.

Even as Congressional Republicans, including Mr. Boehner, denounced Mr. Akin’s remark that victims of “legitimate rape” were able to somehow prevent pregnancy, an agenda to roll back abortion is one that House Republicans have largely moved in step with.

In an anti-abortion measure once sponsored by Mr. Akin, Mr. Ryan and scores of other Republican lawmakers, an exemption was made for victims of “forcible” rape, though that word was later removed.

On Tuesday, Republicans approved platform language for next week’s nominating convention that calls for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion with no explicit exceptions for cases of rape or incest. That is a view more restrictive than Mr. Romney’s, who has said that he supports exceptions to allow abortions in cases of rape.

Ryan center and Akin to the right in a photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

So Democrats can now keep tying Paul Ryan, Todd Akin and the Republican Platform together while Mitt, as usual, tries to dance away from taking a position. After all as Republican Party Chair, Reince Priebus said “this is the platform of the Republican Party, it is not the platform of Mitt Romney.” I titled this “Akin, Ryan, Romney and Women’s Health Care” but if they have their way, women won’t have health care. There is already a large gender gap. We can enjoy watching it get bigger.

August 19, 2012 by mhasegawa

Why Obama may lose

OK. I’ve been a little out of sorts the last few days election=wise. I’ve been spending a little time working in one of Elizabeth Warren’s field offices making voter ID calls and doing data entry. It is going to be a close race with Scott Brown and every vote is going to count. And then I saw this in yesterday’s New York Times as part of Charles M. Blow’s column.

If you know any of these people tell them to register and/or to vote. There is still time. If even some of them vote, it will make a difference and if all of them do, it will be a landslide re-election for President Obama.

This is one of the reasons why Patrick McDonnell and Mutts have captured my mood perfectly

August 16th 2012 - Mutts

[From August 16th.]

Let’s get out there, find those voters and get them to the polls. Then maybe Crabby won’t have to be quite so crabby!

August 15, 2012 by mhasegawa

Joe Speaks

Yesterday Vice President Joe Biden got carried away and maybe used an unfortunate turn of phrase, but, as usual Joe spoke honestly and told the truth. And how do I know he told the truth? Just look at Mitt Romney’s reaction.

So what did Joe actually say? According to the Washington Post

Campaigning in southern Virginia on Tuesday, Vice President Biden told an audience that Mitt Romney’s approach to regulating the financial industry will “put y’all back in chains,” a remark that triggered a flurry of Republican criticism, including a sharp rebuke from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

“Look at their budget and what they’re proposing,” Biden said. “Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days, he is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They are going to put y’all back in chains.”

This set off a firestorm. Joe walked back the remark a little, but basically stood by what he said. Mitt Romney went a little nuts. (and, according to the Daily Kos, a scripted nuts since Mitt used a teleprompter). The New York Times put it this way

Standing in front of a stately town hall here in central Ohio, under a giant banner that read “Victory in Ohio,” Mr. Romney called Mr. Biden’s claim “another outrageous charge.”

“This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like,” he said.

In a personal dig that he wrote at the last minute Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Romney told the president to “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.”

The Times also reported that the White House stood by the Biden remarks.

Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney is seen in a tele prompter reflection waiting to speak to supporters at the Chillicothe Victory rally in Chillicothe, Ohio August 14, 2012. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton (UNITED STATES)

Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney is seen in a tele prompter reflection waiting to speak to supporters at the Chillicothe

Victory rally in Chillicothe, Ohio August 14, 2012. Photograph by Shannon Stapleton.

So what are we to make of all this? The campaign is going to get very ugly. I think the Democrats are right to let Joe Biden be the attack dog and hopefully let President Obama be above the fray. But on a fundamental level, Joe Biden is right. The impact of the Republican proposals is on the poor even more that on the middle class. And the poor are still to a great extent people of color who understood what Joe was saying.

Jonathon Capehart put it this way in the Washington Post

So much for the selection of Paul Ryan as the veep nominee as the end of the petty bickering and the start of the campaign of “big ideas.” Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul claims that “President Obama’s campaign keeps sinking lower.” What was the offense? Vice President Biden said the word “chains.”

In tone and bite, Biden is to the Obama campaign what John Sununu is to the Romney campaign. Only the vice president is polished and likeable. Biden was speaking at a Virginia rally that the Associated Press reports “included hundreds of black people,” and he warned the assembled that Romney wanted to do away with the post-2008 regulations on Wall Street. “Unchain Wall Street,” Biden said. “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” Yeah, that was wince-worthy. It shall join all the others on the Biden blooper reel. But the high dudgeon of the Romney campaign is rather precious.

This is the campaign that seemed perfectly fine with Sununu saying he wished the president “would learn to be an American.”

…

This is the campaign that has been mute in the face of Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) hyperbolic assertion that Obama would “rather you be his slave.”

This is the campaign that is allowing Newt Gingrich to host “Newt University” at the Tampa convention this month. The former House speaker is fond of calling Obama a “food stamp president.”A wicked phrase that has more racial baggage than a klansman’s El Camino.

This is the campaign of the candidate who uttered the equally racially fraught “if they want more stuff from government … more free stuff” when talking to supporters in Montana about what he told the NAACP about his desire to repeal Obamacare.

Let’s all be honest. This is a campaign about race. There is a black man in the White House. The Republican’s are fighting a last ditch battle to maintain a white majority in the United States electorate. We see this in the allegations of voter fraud and the purging of voter rolls. We see this in the audiences that surround Mitt and Paul Ryan. Yes, this is an election about economic policy and jobs, but the subtext is always race.

August 13, 2012 by mhasegawa

Paul Ryan’s Proposals in a Nutshell

The Boston Globe columnist, Scott Lehigh wrote what I think is one of the best summaries of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal compared to President Obama’s proposals. And whether Mitt Romney likes it or not, he is tied to the Ryan budget which he once described as “marvelous”.

Lehigh describes the Ryan budget this way

There will be a fierce fight to frame the argument, but Romney and Ryan will have a tougher challenge persuading the relatively small percentage of undecided voters. With Ryan as his running mate, Romney will no longer be able to hide behind strategic ambiguity about his budget and tax cut plans. To date, a lack of key details has made those proposals hard to analyze, which has obviously been intentional. Nor does the Republicans’ presumptive nominee want to be pinned to the details of Ryan’s Medicare plan, which would shift thousands in health care costs onto the backs of future generations of seniors; one of the talking points the campaign distributed to help Republicans discuss Ryan’s selection is that, as president, Romney will have his own Medicare proposal. But absent necessary details about Romney’s proposal, Ryan’s plan will and should stand as a fair campaign proxy.

Second, the reality is that you simply can’t accomplish what Romney and Ryan hope to — that is, a large, new across-the-board tax cut while tackling the long-term federal budget deficit — without hitting both middle-class and moderate earners. A recent analysis by the nonpartisan, well-regarded Tax Policy Center illustrated that very point. It showed that Romney’s vague assertion that he could pay for his new tax cut by closing loopholes and deductions, but without targeting those important to the middle class, was undoable. If Romney hews to his resolution to pay for his tax cut through loophole closings, the elimination of deductions would be so extensive that the average middle class family would see a tax hike, according to the center’s analysis.

Of course we already know that Romney considers the Tax Policy Center to be a Democratic front. The difference in approaches?

Now, with the baby boomers retiring and increasingly drawing on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the nation faces a large gap between future spending commitments and future revenues. But though tax cuts helped create the problem, Romney and Ryan insist it must all be solved through spending cuts. That flies in the face of several recent bipartisan deficit commissions, which have said that policy makers should rely on both spending cuts and new revenues.

President Obama, by contrast, wants tax breaks for upper earners to expire, which would mean more revenue, and thus lighter cuts in future spending. Because Obama wants to keeps the tax breaks for families making less than $250,000, substantial spending cuts will still be required, including reductions in entitlements. Obama has left many of those details for the future. But that failing is less egregious than Romney’s. Obama, after all, would recapture $750 billion or more (over 10 years) by ending the Bush tax cuts. And the president isn’t proposing a large new tax cut.

We can only hope that the Democrats can define Paul Ryan as successfully as they were able to define Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney will no longer be able to hide behind strategic ambiguity about his budget and tax cut plans with Paul Ryan as his running mate.

Photograph by SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS

May 13, 2012 by mhasegawa

The Last Word from Newt

Even though we probably haven’t really heard the last word from Speaker Gingrich, it is nice to think that we have. Here is what may be that last word from Doonesbury today.

Newt started out his quest for the 2012 Republican nomination by telling the truth about the Paul Ryan budget. I think the two things I will remember him most for are the Contract on American and Right Wing Social Engineering. Maybe he can start a new career helping zoos and conservation centers.

May 12, 2012 by mhasegawa

Romney’s empathy or the lack thereof

I’ve been following closely the stories on the bullying incident at Cranbrook. I was, like many, horrified at the incident. But I was more horrified by the fact that no one at Cranbrook thought it necessary to discipline the young men involved. And I was most horrified by Mitt Romney’s nervous giggle when asked about the incident. I’ve been groping for an explanation of why he doesn’t remember what happened when the others involved remember it clearly. Then I read this very interesting article in the Boston Globe this morning. The story quoted a gentleman named Don Gorton.

While some observers have expressed doubt that anyone could forget such a dramatic episode, one activist who has studied bullying said he believes Romney may, in fact, have no recollection.

Teenagers who bully others often don’t remember the incidents because they weren’t traumatic for them, said Don Gorton, chairman of the Anti-Violence Project of Massachusetts, a nonprofit group that seeks to reduce violence against gays and lesbians.

“Empathy is the critical variable,’’ Gorton said. “If they don’t feel their victims’ pain, the episode won’t stand out. It wasn’t a big deal for them.’’

Empathy. That is what explains a great deal about Mitt Romney. He lacks empathy. People have been saying that he can’t relate to the common person and he has given many examples. He likes to fire people. A young person who can’t find a job should get his or her parents to give them a loan to start a business. He supports the Ryan budget which raises the defense budget at the expense of the middle class and poor. Plus he certainly was cruel to poor Seamus the dog.

In the Massachusetts Governor’s Office

The President and Gay Marriage

The commentators are in full flower. “This is a great move.” “It is risky.” “This could cost him the election.” What does it really mean? We won’t know until the election in November, but we can try to bring some clarity to some of the noise.

Photograph by Pete Souza

We know that many of those who oppose gay marriage for religious or other grounds will never be convinced, but I expect that some will come around to saying something like “I personally don’t support gay marriage, but as a matter of rights, people should be able to choose.” Kind of like what many Democrats have said about abortion. But the majority of the opposition will remain opposed.

Some will say this was a cynical move on the part of the President to solidify his gay and lesbian supporter. I don’t think so. Richard Socarides wrote in the New Yorker

For a long time, Democrats have taken the gay vote for granted. Political consultants tell Democrats that gay and lesbian voters have nowhere else to go, and thus, in effect, can be counted on, so long as politicians pay lip service to the issue. But that is old thinking, out of touch with the new reality of the gay-rights movement. While I know that most gays and lesbians would have supported President Obama, both with their votes and with their financial contributions, no matter what he did on the issue of marriage equality, we were also not going to take “no” for an answer on the most important civil-rights issue of our day. That meant holding the President’s feet to the fire—first on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and then on marriage equality.

What we do know is that this was an act of courage and leadership. President Obama may be part of the tide rising toward marriage equality, but he is part of the leading edge. Andrew Sullivan

I do not know how orchestrated this was; and I do not know how calculated it is. What I know is that, absorbing the news, I was uncharacteristically at a loss for words for a while, didn’t know what to write, and, like many Dish readers, there are tears in my eyes.

…

The interview changes no laws; it has no tangible effect. But it reaffirms for me the integrity of this man we are immensely lucky to have in the White House. Obama’s journey on this has been like that of many other Americans, when faced with the actual reality of gay lives and gay relationships. Yes, there was politics in a lot of it. But not all of it. I was in the room long before the 2008 primaries when Obama spoke to the mother of a gay son about marriage equality. He said he was for equality, but not marriage. Five years later, he sees – as we all see – that you cannot have one without the other. But even then, you knew he saw that woman’s son as his equal as a citizen. It was a moment – way off the record at the time – that clinched my support for him.

Today Obama did more than make a logical step. He let go of fear. He is clearly prepared to let the political chips fall as they may. That’s why we elected him. That’s the change we believed in. The contrast with a candidate who wants to abolish all rights for gay couples by amending the federal constitution, and who has donated to organizations that seek to “cure” gays, who bowed to pressure from bigots who demanded the head of a spokesman on foreign policy solely because he was gay: how much starker can it get?

Both Sullivan and Socarides do believe that in the long run, this will not hurt Obama’s reelection chances. Sullivan first

My view politically is that this will help Obama. He will be looking to the future generations as his opponent panders to the past. The clearer the choice this year the likelier his victory. And after the darkness of last night, this feels like a widening dawn.

Then Socarides

This is not to take anything away from the courage exhibited by President Obama today. His willingness to share with the American people his thinking, indeed, his struggle around this issue will help build a national consensus. Everyone is entitled to a journey on this issue.

I suspect that at the end of this national conversation the result will be a good one, and the process, including Obama’s painstakingly slow evolution, will have been a positive experience for the country. Hopefully, it will lead us in a positive direction—which, after all, is the job of a President.

This is a conversation that is just beginning and we owe the President a conversation that is at once passionate and reasoned. Let me end with this from him

This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president, and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a dad and a husband and, hopefully, the better I’ll be as president.

May 3, 2012 by mhasegawa

Can we take Mitt seriously?

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is difficult to peg. I’m not sure that he is interested in governing based on his track record here in Massachusetts while Governor. Romney spent large hunks of his time running for President and not showing much interest in the state. He seems to understand capitalism as practiced by companies like Bain Capital, but is really uninterested in what goes on with ordinary middle class and the working poor. He can’t seem to hit the right notes and for the left is all too often the butt of jokes. Here are two.

Dan Wasserman on Mitt and Harvard.

Then there is Calvin Trillin.

The Republican National Committee Selects a Campaign Slogan

Our slogan’s been chosen.
We think it’s a hit.
We’ll shout from the rafters,
“We settle for Mitt!”

There is the dog on the roof, the liking to fire people, etc. etc. etc.

But he is going to be the nominee for the Republicans and we need to find out what we can take seriously. Greg Sargent writing in the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog took at stab at it today.

A few days ago, Mitt Romney chatted with a bunch of firefighters, who told him about their struggles in the Obama economy. As Romney recalled it: “I asked the firefighters I was meeting with, about 15 or them, how many had had to take another job to make ends meet, and almost every one of them had.”

Of course, firefighters are public sector workers. And Romney has said that public sector workers are getting paid too much, not that they’re getting paid too little. As Jonathan Chait puts it:

Romney’s position is that these fine public servants are luxuriating in excessive pay, a fact that, unlike swelling income inequality, constitutes a major source of unfairness in American life. (“We will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve,” he said last week.)

This is actually a policy flashpoint between the two parties. Public employment has cratered in recent years, with public sector jobs continuing to decline even as private sector jobs rebound, exerting a continued drag on the sluggish recovery. Obama’s position is that the federal government ought to provide aid to state governments to rehire some of the laid-off teachers, cops, and firefighters. Republicans oppose this. Romney seems to have forgotten that the firefighters he came face-to-face with are one category of Americans whose economic pain he’s supposed to be in favor of.

Steve Benen takes this further, adding that the episode and the attendant contradiction reveal the failure of Romney’s “transactional politics.” Romney is looking to take things away from public sector workers, students who rely on Pell Grants, those who rely on entitlements and government programs that might be cut, and the like:

His is an agenda of austerity, a sharp reduction in public investments, and hostility towards government activism in general. In a transactional sense, Romney has to hope most voters aren’t looking to make a traditional electoral trade, because he doesn’t intend to give them anything.

What we can take seriously is that Mitt doesn’t care about anyone who isn’t rich. We can take seriously that he and today’s Republican Party want to take women back to the 1950’s and even further. We need to wake up to the fact that today’s Republican Party offers the 99% nothing. We need to take Mitt at his word and vote for him at our peril.

April 22, 2012 by mhasegawa

Fear of polls

It doesn’t matter whether you support Romney or Obama. When a new poll is released you start to parse it. Who did the poll? Are they a Democratic or Republican leaning pollster? How is it different from the last poll you saw? What do the pundits say? Does the result make me happy or anxious?

This morning RealClear Politics had these numbers:

Average: Obama +3.2

Electoral College: Obama 227 Romney 170 (270 needed to win)

Intrade: Obama 60.4 Romeny 38.2

Nate Silver, my poll guru, had some advice the other day. If you are a political junkie, read the whole article, but here are some of the highlights for me.

1. Be patient. Many of the poll-watching habits you learned for the primaries you will need to unlearn for the general election.

In the primaries, it is often worth paying a tremendous amount of attention to how recently a poll was conducted. Because voter opinion shifts rapidly in primaries, a poll that is even two or three days old might have substantially less information value than one that was released today.

That just isn’t true in the general election, when there are fewer swing voters, the candidates are better known, and voter preferences are more rigid. Instead, polls have a much stronger tendency to revert to the mean, and what is perceived to be “momentum” is often just statistical noise. In October, it might be worth sweating just a little bit if there seems to be a two- or three-percentage point shift against your preferred candidate. Right now, it probably isn’t; a poll released on April 20 isn’t going to be much better in the long-run than one released on April 10.

2. Take the poll average. This ought to be obvious, but you should generally be looking for a trend to show up in several different polls from several different polling firms before you start to view it as newsworthy.

…

5. Pay attention to likely voters versus registered voters. It is worth looking at whether the poll is conducted among registered voters, likely voters or all adults.

In the past eight presidential election cycles or so, the Republican candidate has done a net of about two percentage points better on average in likely voter polls than in registered voter polls.

…

6. Keep paying attention to Mr. Obama’s approval ratings. In the early stages of general election campaigns, a president’s approval ratings have often been at least as accurate a guide to his eventual performance as the head-to-head numbers. Thus, for at least the next couple of months, I would pay as much attention to Mr. Obama’s approval ratings as his head-to-head polls against Mr. Romney.

It is probably slightly better to look at Mr. Obama’s net approval rating — his approval less his disapproval — than the approval rating alone.

…

11. Read the polls in the context of the news. Polls don’t just shift on their own; they change because people are reacting to changes in their circumstances and to different news events.

Political reporters have beats and deadlines and need to turn stories around every day. But most of the day-to-day squabbles that the campaigns have don’t matter to most voters. If there is a shift in the polls, it is much more likely to be real rather than illusory if it follows something like an Israeli air strike on Iran or a stock market crash than something like this or this.

The other caution is that even when major news events do shift the polls, they sometimes have a half-life with the effects fading over time. These events may produce long-term and permanent effects on how voters see the candidates, but they often overshoot the mark in the close term. Recent examples include the uptrend in Mr. Obama’s approval ratings after the death of Osama bin Laden or the downtrend following the debt ceiling negotiations, both of which persisted for some weeks but then faded.

My conclusion: This is going to be close election. Closer than in my opinion it should be.

April 17, 2012 by mhasegawa

Mittens the mean

Whether you are going to vote for him or not, Mitt Romney has kinda a nice but clueless rich guy image. Don’t let that fool you. Joan Vennochi reminds us of his history here in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts is where Romney first showed his appetite for running over any candidate who stands between him and political office. Here, it happened to be women.

When Romney decided to run against Ted Kennedy in 1994, Republican Janet Jeghelian, a former talk radio host, was in the race. Once Romney jumped in, he and the state GOP kept her off the primary ballot.

Jeghelian wasn’t a strong candidate, but she was a prescient one. After she was forced out, she predicted he would waffle on abortion rights. It took awhile, but he did.

Seven years later, Romney muscled out acting Governor Jane Swift, who had his pledge that he would not challenge her for the nomination. But fresh from running the winter Olympics, Romney jumped in, and without so much as a courtesy phone call, pushed out the politically weak Swift.

Realizing the delicacy of kicking aside the Bay State’s first female chief executive, Romney recruited another woman, Kerry Healey, to run as his lieutenant governor and vouch for his pro-choice credentials. Once elected, he relegated Healey to back channel roles, but she remains loyal and supports his presidential bid.

These tactics should be familiar to Rick Santorum and the other Republican candidates only there he did it with his super Pac and advertising.

Joan’s point is that all of this leads to a lack of trust which hurts him particularly among women. And while he has flip-flopped on a number of issues two matter to women. The first is his support of abortion rights during his Massachusetts Senate campaign. And he has done a major flop on Massachusetts health care reform.

As Shannon O’Brien, the Democrat he defeated in 2002, points out, “The choice issue is just one glaring reason why women can’t trust Mr. Romney. The broader, more profound issue is about what he will do to protect and preserve family health care across the country. Where he had such promise as governor, setting the stage for using Massachusetts as a national model, now he’s saying he didn’t mean it, never said it, doesn’t want it. That’s the biggest flip-flop-flip that women should be concerned about.’’

Massachusetts Democrats are gleefully reminding voters of Romney’s singular role in health care reform. He pushed for the individual mandate. He personally escorted the first woman who signed up for Romneycare. At his request, his official State House portrait, which hangs in the reception area of the governor’s office, includes the artist’s rendition of Romney’s wife, Ann, and a stack of papers representing the state’s health care law.

Will he have his portrait replaced next?

Men and women run against each other with regularity these days. Look at President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. The point is that Mitt doesn’t seem to care about the niceties. He could have run in a primary against both Swift and Jeghelian and maybe he would have won. Maybe it is just coincidence that the two candidates he ran over were women and we will never know whether he would have jumped in if they had been men. I think he just would have competed in the primary and blasted his opponent with negative advertising.

So all of you fellow Obama supporters take heed: this is not a nice guy and brace yourself for a negative campaign and he tries desperately to recapture the women’s vote he needs to win. Luckily, I don’t think he can flip again on either abortion or health care as that flip will cost him his Republican support.

We can only hope he stays perplexed.

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2012 Election