becky sarwate

This week Republican primary co-front runner Mitt Romney demonstrated once again that neither he, nor his increasingly radical political party give a fig about the quality of life of America’s middle class. Multiple media outlets reported Romney’s compassionately conservative response to a struggling college student who queried him at a town hall meeting about the profoundly unaffordable costs of a college degree in the 21st Century.

My favorite headline came courtesy of New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait: “Mitt: Pay for Your Own Damn College!” Chait distilled Romney’s heartless rejoinder rather well. What Mittens actually said was:

It would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to pay for your college, but I’m not going to promise that. Don’t just go to one that has the highest price. Go to one that has a little lower price where you can get a good education. And hopefully you’ll find that. And don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on.

Charles Dickens first published his classic novel David Copperfield in 1850, featuring the villainous Uriah Heep, described in a Wikipedia entry as a character “notable for his cloying humility, obsequiousness, and insincerity, making frequent references to his own ‘humbleness.’ His name has become synonymous with being a yes man.”

It’s tempting to believe Dickens may have been clairvoyant in his creation of Heep, conjuring a future in which a quarter of a billionaire automaton can make like a living, breathing regular guy. I thought that the gold standard for radical right wing pandering had been provided by “Maverick” John McCain during the 2008 campaign, but McCain’s about faces on issues like immigration in order to secure his party’s trust simply don’t do Romney’s kowtowing justice. Is there anything this former moderate, somewhat socially liberal fraud won’t say to get the nomination?

In this case however, we have reason to suspect that Mittens said exactly what he means. After all, why should he care? He and every friend he has possess the cash and the Ivy League legacies to ensure that their offspring will go to the higher learning institutions of their choosing. It’s not they who will be saddled with debt after graduation. And if that “little lower price” degree from a state school that Romney so generously recommends for you should still run an average of $40,000 before factoring in room and board, well you’ve got two choices don’t you? A lifetime of debt or minimum wage. It’s your problem for not being born rich.

What’s perhaps more telling is Chait’s observation that Romney’s comments at the town hall were met with “sustained applause from the crowd at a high-tech metals assembly factory.” Now I am going to go out on a limb and hazard that attendees at a Romney gathering are going to lean mostly right, so ok, these folks were predisposed to drink in the bland Kool-Aid that is the Mitt brew. But factory workers cheering a candidate who unapologetically snubs his nose at the idea of affordable, universal education? How much longer can Republicans expect they are going to find willing accomplices within the hard working, low paid ranks of their base? Sooner or later the spell will be broken. It has to be.

Bold attacks on middle class infrastructure is nothing new to the GOP. You won’t hear them complaining about the stagnant wages of workers while CEO pay has skyrocketed. They have no qualms touting party planks that champion the withholding of rights from everyone from members of the gay community to females who wish to make decisions regarding their own bodies. But the blatant, sound-bite ready pride with which these candidates can look a student dead in the eye and tell them to toughen up, while boasting about the two Cadillacs in the driveway, is just sickening.

To put it mildly, I am a fan of New York Times Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins. While Collins, the first woman at the Old Grey Lady to bear the title of editorial page editor, is a brilliant thinker with journalistic credentials as long as my arm (which according to my personal trainer is rather orangutan-like in its breadth), it’s more than her pedigree that incites fervor. Collins’ style, so humble and approachable, bears at the same time a kind of sharpened common sense that can devastate the opposition. Combine these traits with the kind of natural wit that could have landed Collins a career in sketch comedy writing and you have a recipe for truly special work. It is a shame that she’s only contracted to publish twice a week while it seems like I am bored by the latest meditation on morality from David Brooks every other day. Zzzz.

Anyway, I am about two-thirds of the way through Collins’ 2009 non-fiction wonder, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present. It is a truly enthralling tome that recounts “the astounding revolution in women’s lives over the past 50 years.” The book starts with the early stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement and the Sexual Revolution: two events in American history that changed the way U.S. women viewed their bodies, their work, their neighbors and their places in society. It is a must-read told in the engaging narrative style of a compelling novel.

The underlying argument of the book, while never explicitly stated, is that women have fought hard to break free of the patriarchal conventions that kept them locked inside the home, and beholden to the laws of men, for centuries. There’s no going back. Now remember this book was published in 2009 and Collins is no wide-eyed youth, and yet, viewed through the prism of the 2012 Republican primaries, the author’s certainty that certain freedoms can be taken for granted seems dangerously naive.

In a recent column dated February 8, 2012, Collins wandered into the fray between the White House and Catholic bishops over the administration’s proposed rule that would have required Catholic universities and hospitals to cover contraceptives in their health care plans. It’s almost as though the columnist can’t believe she has to write this:

“The church is not a democracy and majority opinion really doesn’t matter. Catholic dogma holds that artificial contraception is against the law of God. The bishops have the right — a right guaranteed under the First Amendment — to preach that doctrine to the faithful. They have a right to preach it to everybody. Take out ads. Pass out leaflets. Put up billboards in the front yard.

The problem here is that they’re trying to get the government to do their work for them. They’ve lost the war at home, and they’re now demanding help from the outside.”

Welcome to an alternative universe where women are in the position of having to fight for reproductive freedoms that have been assumed for the better part of 40 years.

It may come as no surprise that women who sit on the left side of the political spectrum have been horrified by recent events such as Susan G. Komen’s disingenuous plan to defund Planned Parenthood, or U.S. Rep. Darrel Issa’s convention of a hearing this past Thursday morning on the birth control benefit issue – with an all-male panel. But why aren’t more Republican women howling? Surely conservative male attempts to control our bodies without our input is an issue that ought to unite womankind of all political stripes?

Take this week’s philosophical waxing from Foster Friess, the 71 year-old multimillionaire Rick Santorum donor and colossal jackass, who was quoted as saying to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, “this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s such inexpensive. Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.” Why weren’t Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin the first ones out of the gate, shooing the old coot back into the crypt from which he crawled?

After all, the careers of both women would never have been possible without the 20th century woman’s movement. The never-married, childless Coulter is a serial dater (and I am presuming sexually active) with the freedom to run her big mouth on any cable news program she chooses. And Palin with her five children would have been vilified a mere half-century ago for her public proclivities.

Yet women on the right have been curiously silent during an assault on life and liberty that shows no sign of abating. This, almost more so than the white male attempt to roll back decades of female empowerment, is a real shame.

I would argue that all this talk about birth control and abortion is yet another attempt by the GOP to use social issues as a distracting wedge, to prevent the poorer section of the party’s base from focusing on the increasingly disparate positions of the haves and have nots. After all it’s a lot easier to forget that you’re out of a job, have lost your home and retirement account when you have elected leaders yelping about the imminent annihilation of “family values.” But the party’s female caucus shouldn’t allow it. I am publicly calling on them to disavow this strategy. What say you Ann Coulter?

This week I came across a comment in a decidedly apolitical magazine, Entertainment Weekly, that stopped me in my tracks. Having recycled the glossy already, I’ve forgotten the name of the columnist who surveyed the present theatrical penchant for nudity (with special recognition going to the, um, well-endowed Michael Fassbender). During the course of this entertaining column, the author also bestowed accolades upon legendary actress Meryl Streep, for imbuing “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher with a confident sexiness in her recently Oscar-nominated performance.

That was eyebrow raising enough, having recalled from my youth a stuffy, conservative British woman with helmet hair and a penchant for neck-obscuring silk scarves. But further, Entertainment Weekly’s liberal columnist suggested that even in the throes of advanced dementia, it might be worth rousing the elderly Thatcher from her sick bed in order to provide the U.S. Republican caucus with a credible presidential candidate.

While the larger theme of the column was cinema, I think the piece made a prescient point about a lack of credibility from the current crop of GOP hopefuls. It is a phenomenon that has become almost incredibly easy to ignore given the seriousness with which the media has either chosen (Fox) or been forced (CNN) to the take candidates.

As I intimated in my column last week, no matter who emerges victorious from the charade that has become the Republican primaries, and despite attacks from many corners of the electorate, it’s difficult to imagine President Obama facing a credible challenge. Because even if we keep the bar of fitness for running the nation fairly low to the ground, for example going no higher than basic sanity, I would think Obama has to be the choice for most of the mainstream. It occurred to me that if entertainment magazines can sort of nonchalantly point out the obvious, our position may be stronger than the insulated extreme right can grasp.

Consider that current momentum-builder Rick Santorum has a “family values” history that includes behaviors even many conservatives might find macabre. An ABC News blog post from early January quotes liberal Fox News contributor Alan Colmes (ahem, I will take that label with a grain of salt) as saying, “Get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after child birth home and played with it so that his other children would know that the child was real.”

Unfortunately folks, that is not an incendiary rumor. This happened. And while I am in no position to judge the actions of a grieving parent, when a member of the corporate media arm of your party thinks you might be a little nutso, there may be fire from whence the smoke is emanating.

Fox News (I will continue to use the example as long as it helps my case) has also addressed the old yarn about Mitt Romney driving to Canada in the early 1980s with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car. It is true that Romney was only 36 years-old at the time, but really, isn’t that mature enough to know better? A piece by columnist Lanny Davis is precisely titled, “Why Romney’s ‘dog on car roof’ story makes him unfit to be president.”

I have not space enough to address the long and voluminous history of Crazy Town Mayor Newt Gingrinch. Suffice it to say that during a national job interview process that requires a sustained disposition toward good judgment, none of the GOP’s “Big Three” can bear a comparison with the POTUS.

Barack H. Obama is many things to many people, but hotheaded and irrational are not adjectives that come up often, even amongst his most violent critics. The Commander-in-Chief may be calm and poised even to a point of frustration (for me) at certain times, but all things considered, I will take that over candidates who believe strapping living creatures to the luggage rack represents a sound traveling strategy.

To return to my initial point, I think it says a lot that there’s a strain of common nostalgia for the likes of conservative stalwart Margaret Thatcher. Even if you disagree with nearly everything she stood for as Prime Minister (as I decidedly do), she wasn’t easy to dismiss. And there were never any questions about her basic competence. A show of hands for Republican presidential candidates that can say the same? Not so fast Santorum, Mittens and Newty.