Women Voters | featured news

With the Republican National Convention at last in full-throated roar, nominee Mitt Romney and his team reached out Wednesday to connect with critical voting groups - veterans, Hispanics and women - while gleefully mocking the man he is out to defeat in November.

"We've had the old Romney-Ryan plan before - the top-down, give wealthier folks more tax breaks and somehow that's going to trickle down - it didn't work, it led to this economic disaster that the president inherited. We tried that, it failed, the Obama plan is much better for North Carolina," Dem. Rep. Jennifer Weiss, of Wake County, said.

President Obama's latest television ad is designed to appeal to an important demographic: Women. Entitled "first law," the commercial emphasizes the first bill Obama signed as president, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

A boom in users on the social media site — and the fact that more than two-thirds are women — is attracting political messages to the site best known for recipes, crafts and I-want-that images. In political persuasion, as in marketing, "it's always the next big hot thing," says Zac Moffatt, digital director for Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. "And it's kind of hot right now."

While President Obama may win the women, Hispanic and youth vote, the turnout will likely be lower and the spread smaller, which could cost him the election.

After Hilary Rosen’s remarks about Ann Romney’s life as a homemaker, some thought Democrats might tread more cautiously in their attempt to paint the GOP as being anti-women. Nope.

For Republicans and certain presidential nominee Mitt Romney, the best defense appears to be a good offense on issues and themes being pushed by President Barack Obama and Democrats.

In a year when the war on women rages, Nugent’s words leave a sour taste and conjure up unsettling, violent images. Of course, under the constitution, Nugent has the right to say anything. But, as my mother always says, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

We criticized Republicans last week for promoting the “true but false” assertion that under Obama, women have lost seven times as many jobs as men. This did not stop the Mitt Romney campaign from trying to promote this idea, which Treasury Secretary Geithner on Sunday labeled “ridiculous and deeply misleading.”

Women who stay at home to raise their children should be given federal assistance for child care so that they can enter the job market and "have the dignity of work," Mitt Romney said in January, undercutting the sense of extreme umbrage he showed when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen quipped last week that Ann Romney had not "worked a day in her life." The remark, made to a Manchester, N.H., audience, was unearthed by MSNBC's "Up w/Chris Hayes," and will air during the 8 a.m. hour of his show Sunday.