Economy, Women Voters | featured news

President Obama touts antidiscrimination legislation and attacks Mitt Romney for targeting Planned Parenthood, while Romney says women have suffered under Obama... Picking up where their contentious debate left off, President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney battled Wednesday for the support of female voters, underscoring their potentially decisive role in settling the fiercely competitive race.

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.”

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner pushed back on Mitt Romney's statements that women made up almost all jobs lost during the Obama presidency. "It's misleading and ridiculous," Geithner said on CBS News' "Face the Nation." "It's just a political moment." On the campaign trail, Romney attempted to turn the discussion to women and the economy, blaming President Obama for hurting women's checkbooks.

The Romney campaign has been repeating the stat all week: Women account for 92.3 percent of jobs lost under Obama. That number is, everyone agrees, misleading. But that’s politics.

President Barack Obama will aim his economic message at women voters as he campaigns on the West Coast for two female candidates crucial to Democrats' chances of keeping their fragile majority in the U.S. Senate.