Can Ann Romney Cover for Mitt’s Agenda?
Last night as expected, Ann Romney’s speech covered her husband’s image in warm fuzzy love.
The New York Times suggested that Ann Romney’s speech, which highlighted the hard work she put in to raise five boys and battle two serious illnesses, may have zapped some of the energy away from her husband.
How and why any woman can drink the Kool-aid Ann Romney served up is a topic for another day. But no amount of Ann’s love and charming demeanor can obscure the realities of Mitt Romney’s intent if elected.
Politico Arena asked me whether Ann Romney’s speech at the Republican National Convention would persuade voters, including women, that her husband is someone we can trust.
Indeed, Americans can trust Mitt. There was never any doubt, and it didn’t take a speech by his wife to tell us the many ways we can trust him:
- We can trust Mitt Romney to escalate the War on Women (see this graph for a day-by-day chronology of what he and his party have already done to destroy women’s human and civil rights to full person-hood and to make their own childbearing decisions, to get equal pay for equal work, and to have access to health care for themselves and their families).
- We can trust him to be in the pocket of the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, the evangelical right-wing, and the Tea Partiers. That doesn’t give him much governing wiggle room even if he had his own agenda, which he clearly does not—beyond getting elected, that is.
- We can trust him to give tax cuts to the wealthiest 1% and squeeze more taxes out of the rest of us, especially the struggling middle class. Even Republican analysts have said his tax plan (to the extent he has actually been specific about it) doesn’t add up and will further unbalance the budget.
- We can trust him to gut the Affordable Care Act, though it is modeled on the health plan he spearheaded as governor of Massachusetts.
- We can trust him to destroy Medicare and attempt to eviscerate Social Security, both of which enable millions of seniors to live out their last years with some semblance of dignity and independence.
- We can trust him to run roughshod over any attempts toward environmental sustainability.
- We can trust that he will never be trustworthy because he has no bedrock principles other than doing whatever it takes to become president, even running on a Republican Party platform so draconian he has opposed almost everything in it at some time or another in his attempts to get elected.
Romney will need more than speeches by his wife to cover up the negative realities of what his presidency would mean to the American people in their daily lives.
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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Thank you for the incredible reality check. Ann Romney is compelling and strong and absolutely committed — all venerable qualities. We just need to keep perspective and steel ourselves to the bigger picture, no matter how well crafted the pitch may be. Yes?
Keep your eyes wide open and question everything.