Mitt Romney on Offense on ‘War on Women’
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images(HARTFORD, Conn.) — The Mitt Romney campaign is going on the offense addressing a perceived gender gap, filing in groups of women at his events, repeating again and again their argument that more than 92 percent of jobs lost under the Obama administration were held by women, and now sending a barrage of statements from female politicians disparaging the president’s economic policies.
“I was disappointed in listening to the president as he’s saying, ‘Oh Republicans are waging a war on women,’” Romney said on Wednesday, speaking at Alpha Graphics, a female-run business in downtown Hartford, Conn. “The real war on women is being waged by the president’s failed economic policies.”
Romney, who on Tuesday also spoke at a female-run construction firm in Delaware and also met with female business leaders privately before both events, then took one of the signs that his staff had handed out before his event began that features a graphic of jobs lost under the Obama administration and spoke about the numbers.
“This is an amazing statistic — the percentage of jobs lost by women in the president’s three, three and a half years — 92.3 percent of all the jobs lost during the Obama years have been lost by women,” said Romney. “92.3 percent! Now the president says, ‘Oh I didn’t cause this recession’ — that’s true. He just made it worst and made it last longer and because it lasted longer, more and more women lost jobs. Such that in his three and a half years, 92.3 percent of the people who have lost jobs have been women.”
“His failures have hurt women,” Romney said of Obama.
The Romney campaign has backed up their claim by providing employment statistics between January 2009, when Obama first took office, and March 2012, but Democrats and the Obama administration have pounced, saying that the numbers the campaign is using, while not inaccurate, do not reflect the full context of the situation when Obama took office.
But both the Obama campaign and the nonpartisan fact-check site Politifact have taken issue with Romney’s figures. Politifact also rated the Romney campaign’s claim and the 92 percent figure as “mostly false.” The site suggested job losses were split between both the Bush and Obama presidencies. Men suffered more job losses at the outset of the recession when President Bush was in office.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning website has since said it will review the rating after receiving a letter from Lanhee Chen, Romney’s policy director, on Wednesday.
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