We’ve heard a lot in recent days from assorted manosphere dudes about how the “slut vote” – and the endless hunger of our nation’s “sluts” for free contraception – helped to bring about a humiliating end to Romney’s presidential hopes. The sluts went for Obama, we heard, because he promised them (and women in general) what they supposedly want most: “free stuff without ever having to work.”
Minus the word “slut,” this was the basic argument we’ve heard over the past week from a lot of right-wingers as well, including such big names as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, who’ve been loudly complaining that Obama won over women – and minorities – by promising to give them “stuff.”
Well, today, a new voice joined this chorus: Mitt Romney himself. In a conference call today with some of his big donors – no doubt a fairly dispirited bunch – Romney offered this explanation for his defeat:
The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people. … In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups.
Never mind, as the Los Angeles Times points out, that Romney lost in some key states that have a minimal minority population, or that Romney’s promised tax cuts could be considered gigantic gifts to the rich.
While Romney talked less about gender than he did about race and enthnicity, he did single out one group that he said Obama had been especially generous to: young women. And you all know the easiest way to bribe a young female voter. As Romney put it:
Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women.
Apparently the government has been shipping out birth control pills along with those Obama Phones.
There are also couples that don’t want to divorce, but do so only so that one parent can get Medicaid for their children. My cousin had to have another baby to keep her family eligible for Medicaid when her husband got a pay raise at his job. She didn’t want a second baby, but she couldn’t afford insurance. Another one of my cousins is facing bankruptcy because his baby son has glaucoma, and had to have expensive surgeries to not go blind. If we could just have the single payer system, families wouldn’t break up or lose their homes when these medical crises happen.
I already see benefits from the ACA, because I don’t have to pay copays for my kids’ physicals, vaccinations, flu shots, and dental exams anymore. By making it easier for us to get these preventative services, the ACA is saving everyone from paying for much more expensive health problems in the future.
The ACA also helps ensure that pregnant people can get the prenatal care they need to carry their babies to full term and prevent many birth defects. Again, this saves big money in the long run. If the Republicans really cared about fetuses as much as they put on, then they would cheer for that.
I still prefer a single payer system, but I’m happy for the changes we’ve gotten so far. Ha ha, I’m preaching to the choir, too.
Natfantastic: I appreciate your wonderful offer. As in Ameriform dialect, “washing up” implies attending to personal hygiene, all able-bodied Americans are even in the habit of doing it for themselves.
Manboobzers are welcome to migrate to the Old World should the secessions happen in a bad way, not in a consenting adult sandbox kind of way! Or Canada, it’s a bit closer. We have jobs, taxes and excellent health care for everyone who dips in according to their ability. 😛
@Ice
The average western or northern Euro country spends much less on health care than the US and gets much more bang for the buck, as can be seen from comparative statistics. Nonprofitness plays a factor I think, as does the fact the money is from the tax pool and thus forces the government to spend wisely, in case it runs out. Here in the Netherlands you pay a minimum of about 90euros/month of insurance that covers absolutely everything necessary, more if you want luxuries like contraceptives and contact lenses. And even then it’s like… 130e/month for example what I pay. And my package includes stuff like TV and private room if hospitalised, which most people don’t need. I find it very reasonable. And it costs the government less than the US system, in percentages of budget. It’s handled differently in different countries, how much individual pays as flat fees and how much in taxes but my calculations say it averages to about the same.
This is also a marketing failure on the part of some liberals. Reactionaries like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh love to get people all worked up over the “limousine liberals” that supposedly want to ban church, hunting, eating meat, and country music. Sometimes liberals play into that by using classist insults against poor conservatives. It would help a lot more if Democrats would try to relate and explain to poor conservatives how their lives would improve with progressive politics. If someone needs to shoot a squirrel or say Missour-uh instead of Missour-ee to win people over, then they should. Now there are some people that just can’t be won over, because they’re too thoroughly indoctrinated by Fox News, but there are others that can be with just little changes like that.
Confused Brit here! What would that mean, symbolically speaking? I’m a bit confused because I don’t think it can be to do with hunting, and to a Brit hunting is usually associated with toffs anyway.
@eline – the nonprofit aspect is what bothers Republicans the most. They believe everything in the world should be a for-profit venture. The government should do nothing but churn out money to the military-industrial complex, literally. Everything else should be handled by private companies, that’s their dogma. Romney even said so in the election.
Making health insurance a function of the government takes profit out of the hands of private businesses, and that’s anathema. That’s primarily why they want to kill what little socialized medicine we have and also end Social Security. A very large, organized group of powerful businessmen see the big sums of money that come from taxes and go into Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security and feel they should be the ones getting that money, to do with whatever they wish, rather than it being given to the government. Because these guys are entitled assholes, they think they’re being denied what’s rightfully theirs, rather than seeing it as the government being a far safer organization to hold workers retirement money than the stock market.
The racist overtones of “Those People” getting benefits from “your” taxes is how they sell it. The “big government is taking over” is how the party sells it (nevermind big government forcing itself into womens’ vaginas, that’s okay). All of that is rhetoric. This is, as with everything, always about money.
@Cassandra – hunting in the US is widely seen as a right-wing thing. Politicians courting right wing votes often stage photo ops while hunting in order to prove themselves. Also poor people in rural parts of the US are stereotyped as eating squirrel (some people do eat squirrel, but it’s also used as a stereotype of “dumb rednecks eating gross things”).
If you are really from the rural South, you know better than to shoot squirrels. The proper way to pothunt them is squirrel-lobbing. For that, you have to be a deadeye with a stone between the size of a quarter and a fifty cent piece. Those who have been stuffing themselves on your pecans, your peaches, and your garden produce are said to be quite delicious. They are classically served with cream gravy flavored with red sage (Salvia coccinea) or blue marjoram (Salvia riparia), at least in Florida, but elsewhere, oregano would do nicely.
Deer hunting is the most popular, but people also like to hunt quail, rabbit, and squirrel. My dad and brother used to shoot squirrels. Then you have to skin them, cut them up, remove the entrails, boil them, dry them, and fry them. It’s usually the men do the hunting part, and the women have to do the rest. And the preparation can be tricky. You have to remove the pellets if they used a shotgun, unless you like biting pellets lol. It’s just like how men do the frog gigging, but the women do the dirty work after the fun job is done.
It’s not gross at all. It’s pretty decent meat, not as gamey as deer is.
@reymohemmed, all I’ve ever known is people using shotguns or bow hunting for squirrels. Oh, and I also know some people who use traps for squirrels. And I’m not from the rural south. I’m in the midwest, from a rural town in southern Missouri. So I guess the midwestern way is different than the south. Now I’m in Joplin, a big city but still people like hunting here.
Reymohammad, that’s what I mean! A lot of older people have completely forgotten about that. And I apologize that I got my numbers wrong. It was people 45+, not 50+ who voted for Romney in large numbers, according to this: http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/race/president#exit-polls. I’m in my late 40’s, so that’s my people too.
I went to an investment seminar in August. The man giving the seminar, an affluent “self-made” white guy in his early 60’s at one point went off on the state of the world today. He seemed to think that the world was a better place in the 50’s, but he was part of the generation that benefited from the social changes in the 60’s! He also thought that the only major problem we face these days is that our taxes are too high. (And just to demonstrate a little more cognitive dissonance he told us that he thought pot should be legal, because he smokes it.)
After the seminar, I started noticing lots of people 55+ harping on the same theme, people who wouldn’t necessarily have said the same things a decade ago, about how the world was better in the past. The issue that the older people I know care about most is taxes. What I deduce from that is that they’ve gotten their goodies, and now everyone else can go hang.
It’s probably because I live in a conservative area though. Maybe there are older people around me who just aren’t speaking up. I hope so.
Oh and you can also use a .22 I guess to avoid cleaning out pellets.
Totally agree with Bionic Mommy on failure in marketing from liberals in certain cases. I will say though that the union working class debate issues, so conservatives exposed to union workers, or who are union workers at least hear some of the arguments.
@reymohammed
I meant clean the kitchen after you’ve used it, but if you can wash yourself as well, that would be grand 😉
@thebionicmommy: I think there’s a fair number of (sub)urban folks who think that pork, beef and poultry are the only “proper” types of meat. For these folks, eating venison is essentially “exotic” and most anything else is “disgusting.”
I think the mental dividing line for me is that I won’t eat anything that I might consider keeping as a pet. Which is a very urban way to see things, I suspect, and why I feel far weirder about eating rabbit than I do about eating venison.
(This is definitely why of the meats I do eat I feel guiltiest about eating lamb, thus don’t eat it very often, and not in any way guilty about eating fish, since I can’t imagine developing any sort of emotional bond with a fish.)
@Clairedamnit and Reymohammad:
A lot of people in Reymohammad’s generation were not active in the civil rights movements of the sixties and seventies–I was stuck in small town/rural Idaho, for example, and joke that 60’s never made it there.
So, it’s not the whole generation who was liberal/progressive (and I’m sure that some of them have become less so over time).
There seems to be a natural conservatism that many experience as they age (I’ve watched my mother go from boycotting the Republican party over their abortion stance to totally swallowing Bill O’Reilly’s koolaid in the past two decades).
I was radicalized by the shootings at Kent State (was raised Republican, in a state where the Democratic party, mostly Southern Idaho, was controlled by John Birchers and conservative religious groups–primarily LDS and Catholic), and went against the trend in my high school, town, and family by moving leftward (helped by the fact that when I realized I was queer, that explained why I rejected so many of the values), and leaving Idaho as soon as I couild.
There was the backlash–the “Raygun” years — but as a college teacher, who gritted her teeth a lot during oh say the last part of the eighties and a big chunk of the nineties plus with all the trashing of “feminazis” and the erasure of marginalized groups (from my STUDENTS as well as colleagues), I’m seeing a heartening shift in the discourse and values of traditional age college students now — who are much more into feminism (though they might not choose to use that word), and much less bound to rigid gender roles, and much more likely to have friends from different ethnic groups (granted, I’m at a rural Texas university–and a lot of this is just changing recently, and the students I know best are in my sff group). Since my university has students ranging in age from 16 to 60, I can say that there’s no age-group who are identical–there’s always variations (even in rural Texas!).
I fight against Golden Age NOstalgia–but I also know that trashing the past or a generation as a whole is equally simplistic.
Some things in the U.S. are better–things have changed–and people of ALL generations and classes and ethnic groups have fought to make them so.
There’s been too much generational conflict in feminism–it’s frustrating to watch.
If people think venison is weird, that’s fine. Or if they’re vegan and they hate hunting and fishing altogether, that’s also fine. I don’t like mayonnaise, but some people love it. Live and let live.
My problem is how the right wingers have made small things like food preferences of hobbies into political issues to distract people from the important issues. They’re like “Don’t worry about your schools being underfunded, about not being able to afford health care, or how the rich are getting richer while you keep getting poorer. The real problem you face is that latte liberals want to take away your guns and force you to eat diet tofu”. While Jay Nixon is pretty far right for a Democrat, at least he understands this and does plenty of photo ops on hunting and fly fishing trips. It’s a lot better than liberals like David Carr from the New York Times who get on TV and say KS and MO are “the dance of the low sloping foreheads”. It makes me cringe, because it makes it that much harder for progressives to show how we are the real populists.
Then conservatives pretend to be like everyone else even though they’re super rich. George W. Bush was good at that, acting like a cowboy even though he was basically US royalty. Then Mitt Romney ate lunch at Wendy’s on election day, pretending he’s just an average Joe, even though he could buy the whole franchise. The election results this year make me hope that these tactics are losing their effectiveness.
I once helped turn a golf course into a park for a day, to protest budget cuts that were leading the city of L.A. to fence off public parks — while still leaving this (posh, but publicly-funded) golf course open. It was great, we had about 50-60 people with their kids and toys/balls, they used the sand trap as a sandbox, we blew up an inflatable pool and they splashed around in it. The cops were called, but someone higher up didn’t like the “optics” of arresting a bunch of young parents who were playing with their kids, just so that some angry golfers wouldn’t miss their tee time.
That was a fun coalition.
On the plus side, although the public seemed to buy Bush’s attempt to play just folks, they very clearly didn’t buy it from Romney. So maybe people are getting wise to that particular trick.
Could just be that Romney doesn’t do a very good impersonation of a human being in general, though.
@ithiliana
Speak of the devil! When eline said this upthread:
My first thought was, ‘NO! We can’t lose ithiliana!’ So, yeah, please get out of Texas if that ever happens. You have many manboobzers that would take you in.
Texas also has far too much good food for me to be OK with losing it. I’d rather aim to try to win people over to a more reasonable political viewpoint.
My husband described Romney as being about as relatable as Judge Smails from Caddyshack.
I kept thinking of him as a Republican Data, but without the likeability or the intelligence. There’s something weirdly robotic about that man.
My godson has said much the same thing as Claire, but his parents were neither depression babies nor war babies. They were born during the smug, conservative mid-Fifties and raised with the tract house with two-car garage, the TV in the den, the Herald-American, and “adjustment”. That’s why they think that decade was “the Good Old Days”. Some of those Fifties kids were Seventies rebels, but that Seventies crop were a lot more into “personal fulfillment” than mine was. The early Seventies produced the Second Wave, but the late Seventies were just into “mellow”, which got expensive. That’s why, when Reagan dangled the illusion of Fifties “stability” in front of them, too many morphed into Republican-voting yuppies.