On this weekend’s broadcast of “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, Washington Post columnist George Will took on the Obama campaign’s insistence that the GOP is waging a “war on women.”
Will explained that strategy has backfired on the Obama campaign because it suggests women care only about contraception and not salient economic issues.
“There has been a big change — it’s not a particular state,” Will said. “It’s the change in Romney’s gain among women, and that I think represents a huge recoil by professional women with college degrees against the condensation of the Obama campaign … which says, essentially, don’t you trouble your pretty little heads about these men’s issues and all the rest. Worry about contraception, which has been a constitutional right for 47 years. It’s a distraction, the entire ‘war on women’ trope, and I think professional educated women find it offensive.”
Will’s co-panelist, Nicolle Wallace agreed, calling the strategy a “miscalculation” by the president’s campaign.
“It also reveals a grave miscalculation,” Wallace said. “I mean, the Obama campaign put this front and center in their convention and it had a positive effect in terms of rallying their base. It maybe put back together the Obama coalition and united the women that care about reproductive freedom first and foremost … Republicans don’t need to best Democrats [among women]. They just need to tighten it. And I think they both made a gamble. I think it was unclear who was going to be correct. But the Romney campaign made a gamble that enough women cared about the economy and economic issues more than, or at least as much as, reproductive freedom.”