Pro-Obama flack Hilary Rosen doesn’t think Ann Romney knows squat about economics, because she’s one of those stay-at home moms:
What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, “Well, my wife tells me 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 never actually worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the 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—why we worry about their future.
Dana Loesch (and many others) properly focus on the insult to stay-at-home parents implicit in this statement — but I want to focus on the the other message: Ann Romney doesn’t understand the travails of working families.
Like Michelle Obama does, you mean?
Michelle Obama knows the hard scrabble life of earning over $300,000 a year to be a hospital administrator at a hospital that was trying to get earmarks from her husband, the U.S. Senator:
Join President Obama in fighting earmarks! He has fought them ever since, well, never. This is a guy who sought millions and millions in earmarks when he was a Senator — including, famously, “a request for $1 million in federal funding in 2006 for a new pavilion at the University of Chicago Hospitals, where his wife, Michelle Obama, was a vice president at the time.”
Oddly enough, “Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office.” Almost as if the administrators had an inkling that having her there might help them cash in!
It didn’t work, by the way, despite Barry’s best efforts. The earmark didn’t go through, and her salary was promptly reduced back to $273,618.
And when she left, they didn’t replace her. That’s how critical her job was.
In February 2008, Byron York related the difficulties Michelle faced in getting by:
Michelle Obama is sitting with a group of six women around a table in the basement playroom of the Zanesville Day Nursery, here in economically troubled central Ohio. . . . . “It’s a constant sense of guilt,” Obama, dressed simply in a blue sweater with a triple strand of pearls, tells the women of her own dilemma as a working mother.
. . . .
“I know we’re spending — I added it up for the first time — we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we’re spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth,” Mrs. Obama tells the women. “And summer programs. That’s the other huge cost. Barack is saying, ‘Whyyyyyy are we spending that?’ And I’m saying, ‘Do you know what summer camp costs?’”
With all those concerns, one might wonder whether the women should be comforting Mrs. Obama, but she assures them that she’s really O.K. “We don’t complain because we’ve got resources because of our education. We’ve got family structure,” she says. “So I tell people don’t cry for me.”
Don’t cry for me, Argentina.
So you see, if you want a woman who’s been out there fighting the tough economic fight, vote for Barack Obama. Maybe the next time Michelle complains about how tough she had it, she’ll have a quadruple strand of pearls instead of a mere triple.
