You probably know this, but I completely lost my patience with conservatives during the first term of Obama’s presidency, and I no longer have even a little tolerance for articles like this. What bothers me about it is the simple denial about what conservatism has done to the Republican Party.
The article is pretty straightforward in terms of what it is trying to do, and it would have been an appropriate piece of journalism as recently as 2008. But, today, it’s an anachronism. It reads like a newspaper article that was written in the middle of the last decade and frozen in amber.
So, what is it about?
It’s about how the Republican Party’s eventual presidential nominee can appeal to working women. It discusses a few ideas that have come up in conservative think tanks, mainly about parental tax credits and getting an advance on your tax refund if you’re about to take maternity leave. But the piece almost completely ignores that the official conservative position is that the federal government should do absolutely nothing for women, or anybody else. To her credit, the author does get some people to hint at this, but the overall gist is that there are all these conservative women who are just frustrated as all hell that the GOP has nothing to offer working women.
So, here’s the bottom line. Conservatives don’t want to tell voters that they will get nothing and like it. They don’t want to say that the voter’s concern is a state or local issue and that the president isn’t supposed to do fuck-all about it. So, what you get is stuff like this:
It’s not that Republicans don’t want to help women. They would rather help women the conservative way, some GOP strategists said.
Politicians should not focus on one group, the strategists argued, but the country as a whole. After all, if the economy flourishes, everyone prospers. Other Republicans say considerations for working women should be balanced against the needs of small businesses, as well as other economic concerns.
Conservative economists tend to fear the unintended consequences of “one-size-fits-all” policies, said Katie Packer Gage, who co-founded Burning Glass, a political consulting firm that aims to help politicians connect with female voters.
“The more Republican position is: There is only so much employers can bear before they stop hiring people and before the economy starts to suffer,” said Gage, a former Romney strategist. “Democrats are always going to hand out more tax dollars. But what is the breaking point?”
For conservatives, there isn’t anything that the federal government should be doing, with the tax code or anything else, to help mothers pay for day care or to get paid family leave. They shouldn’t get help with college. They shouldn’t even be in the workplace.
And conservatives have completely taken over the Republican Party.
So, what we’re really talking about is a few wankers in conservative think tanks who are still are trying to think of what the federal government might do beside light itself on fire if the GOP ever retakes the White House. They haven’t noticed that the Tea Party is erecting scaffolds for their execution, too.
We aren’t talking about serious policy alternatives to the Democrats here. We’re talking about what line of bullshit a Republican candidate can plausibly spew about his intention to help anyone with anything without having the horde kneecap them and hand the nomination to a better nihilist.
You want the truth? Here’s the truth:
A mother of three young children, [Ainsley] Stapleton said she spends about $2,000 each month on day care, a cost that nearly matches her mortgage payment.
“Republicans, on a federal level, don’t look too much at working women, period,” she said. “If someone like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio came up with a feasible plan to make child care cheaper, they’d win my vote.”
Here’s a bit of advice for Ms. Stapleton. Whoever the Republican nominee is, he will have some answer for how he’s going to make child care cheaper. That answer may sound feasible to you or it may not, but the conservative position is that you’re a goddamned cry-baby and wannabe moocher and you should just go vote for the black party if you want a hand out.
And that’s what the conservatives in Congress think is the right kind of policy for working women. If they’d stay at home where they belong, they wouldn’t have these astronomical day care bills. So, that’s the solution.
