I just read this report from Slate’s Dave Weigel on a Republican Study Committee panel’s advice to candidates on how to talk to us simple womenfolk:
The RSC, like the larger GOP, is on a messaging-to-women binge. North Carolina Rep. Renee Ellmers, a leadership favorite who’s often put forward when the party wants a female messenger on health care or jobs, explained that men failed to bring policy “down to a woman’s level” and thus lost votes.
“Men do tend to talk about things on a much higher level. Many of my male colleagues, when they go to the House floor, you know, they’ve got some pie chart or graph behind them and they’re talking about trillions of dollars and how, you know, the debt is awful and, you know, we all agree with that … 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.”
Excuse me?
Earth to study committee:despite what you have evidently concluded, intellectually challenged females like Renee Ellmers, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann are not typical women. They’re just typical Republican women. You may not have noticed this, since (a) you have spent the past couple of decades taking positions guaranteed to drive intelligent women out of your party; and (b) the men running today’s GOP aren’t exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer, either, if you catch my meaning.
Actually, the utterly tone-deaf and clueless members of that study committee probably won’t catch my meaning. Or much else.
What’s that term we used to throw around at consciousness-raising sessions in the early days of the women’s movement? Ah yes: sexist pigs.
If the snout fits….
When the carcass is rotten, selling the meat becomes more of a challenge.
I just commented on this issue on Facebook. I am a high school dropout with a GED, I understand pie charts and graphs. I also recognize and understand bulls*#t, bigotry, racism, anti-women, sexist blathering when confronted with it. I am totally deaf but I “hear” it all and retain it in my female brain for further feference and to add it to the growing lines on my mental graphs and the larger wedges on my mental pie charts. “We are women, hear us roar!” Come back, Helen Reddy.
Sorry, so upset about this nonsense that I missed my typo “feference” which should of course read “reference”. See, I do have the capability to understand and to admit my shortcomings. I am also aware I have posted other typos so let me apologize at this time for all of them and for those in the future – it is not my ignorance as a woman that causes them, it poor old eyesight and tiny print most of the time…or just plain carelessness, not ignorance.
With leadership like that, what is the appeal of the Republicn party? How do they kep winning elections?
In unrelated news, the GOP foreign affairs committee has concluded that speaker louder and slower will solve communication problems in the Middle East.
Living in the south for the last few years, these are ideas held by many white men more that other parts of the nation I have lived in.
What I call the “Arc of Ignorance” stretches from Virginia south and West across Texas into Arazona . AKA the Bible Belt, where the economies, health care and education are the lowest , people are the poorest and the GOP is solidly in control.
“You can’t fix Stupid”
Couple of things: To the question “Why do they keep winning elections?”, the simple answer is that small energized people who get active in primary politics have an influence/effect far greater than their numbers. And appealing to base (no pun originally intended) instincts doesn’t hurt, either.
On the other hand, as a white man now married (notwitstanding the 7th Circuit’s stay) to one of deeper skin coloration, I still tend to react somewhat negatively to broad-brush characterizations of white males in the Deep South or elsewhere. While I’ve used the bacon-producting noun/adjective myself on probably too many occasions, we who do not wish to be stereotyped shouldn’t throw too many pork rinds from our glass breakfast nooks.
Even for Republicans this is pretty shitty, not to mention monumentally ignorant. All I know is if I am a Democrat, especially in peak campaigning season, I’m hammering this.
@ Ray R Irvin: No, you can’t fix stupid, but you can vote ’em out of office, according to campaign posters floating around during this election cycle.
I just love the title of this article!
Shiela’s favorite cause is civic literacy. An important cause but obviously completely out of reach of many people like Ms Ellmers.
What amazes me is that many Republicans are proud to be associated with her.
Who could they possibly be ashamed of?
As clear and apt a title as I’ve ever seen. I’m completely sympathetic and due the the elequent S.K. I’ve chuckled all day. That’s the only good thing about it.
Why did I read this blog?! I was in a fairly good mood and now I am just furious, speechless, and having some pretty violent thoughts on what I would do and say.
Come on. Don’t just be mad. Get even! These people and a substantial list of Indiana’s politicians need to occupy a public shame list entitled “And They Walk Among Us!” I entertain the belief that if the public saw this in a single page, they would be stunned that these people were actually elected.
I am spending some time in Massachusetts, where I am fantasizing what a debate would look like between any of these creeps (especially Mr. Pence) and one of the statesmen from Massachusetts. With Mr. Pence, I imagine nothing but an empty suit remaining.
From an article in Mother Jones – http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/biology-ideology-john-hibbing-negativity-bias –
A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.
The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments.
In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.
The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. “One possibility,” they write, “is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene,” when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12,000 years ago.)
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The GOP seems to play on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Physiological needs, Safety needs and Love and belonging being the first three. The GOP constantly plays upon the Safety need, all the way back to Richard Nixon’s Law and Order. Safety from others, is now played out with the open carrying of firearms.
The belonging is people like us, which includes the Bible Thumping Churches.
Right On, Sister!!
I’m coming to think that the IQ and educational level in Congress (among some folks, usually far-right republicans) is a major contributor to the dysfunction.
The Republican Study Committee has always been home to the most extreme. Seems like they are sticking to their roots.