As just noted, the Republican Party and the 2012 presidential candidate clown car have a sever problem with Hispanic voters. Compounding this serious problem is the reinvigorated GOP war against women and women's reproductive rights in particular. In a number of states - Virginia certainly received spot light treatment on this issue - under the disingenuous guise of "safety" and "informed consent" women seeking an abortion are facing the equivalent of felony sexual penetration under GOP backed bills. Making the matter even worse, the GOP jumped on the Catholic bishops' bandwagon and attacked the Obama administration's position on contraception coverage in health care plans. Just when one would think things could not get worse for the GOP, Rush Limbaugh shoots off his mouth and attacks a young woman who sought to testify before Congress in the foulest of ways. Like it or not, Limbaugh is increasingly the face of the fear and hate based GOP. A column in The Daily Beast looks at this problem. Here are some excerpts:
By using his mighty megaphone for raunchy name calling, Rush Limbaugh has handed the Democrats a big fat gift. Whatever the damage to the nation’s top radio talker, he has put a face on the argument that President Obama’s party has been mounting for months—that Republicans are waging a “war on women.” In calling Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” merely because she testified to Congress in favor of insurance coverage for birth control, Limbaugh has given the Democrats an indelible image to make their case.
“I don’t know any woman in America who finds being called a ‘slut’ funny,” Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic national chairman, told me. She was referring to Limbaugh’s explanation that his attempt at humor had gone awry. “To suggest that in exchange for access to contraception a woman should have to post sex tapes is just so outrageous.”
The Florida congresswoman also took a shot at Mitt Romney for his tepid response to Limbaugh’s three-day assault on Fluke. “The most their frontrunner could bring himself to say is that he wouldn’t have chosen those words,” Wasserman Schultz says. “You have countless candidates quaking in their boots when asked to criticize him.”
A onetime Romney adviser didn’t argue the point. The former Massachusetts governor “didn’t help himself,” says Alex Castellanos, a top strategist for Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign.
[T]he Obama camp wasted no time in trying to score runs. Shortly after the president called Fluke to commiserate over Limbaugh’s attack, the White House announced he would deliver the commencement address at Barnard College, a prominent women’s school. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi jumped into the fray by calling Fluke on Monday.
“There are a lot of voters out there who view the Obama position on contraceptive coverage very unfavorably,” says Dan Schnur, a former John McCain adviser who now runs the politics institute at the University of Southern California. “But they don’t want to see a college student beaten up and called names for taking the other side.”
El Rushbo continued his damage-control campaign on Monday as more advertisers, including AOL, bailed on his syndicated program . . . . It’s one thing for Limbaugh to taunt Obama or to hurl one of his patented insults, “feminazis,” at an entire gender. But Fluke, a mild-mannered woman who has quietly fought back on such venues as the Today show and The View, has proved a telegenic victim.
Wasserman Schultz rejects this just-a-radio-guy formulation, saying Limbaugh’s “power over the Republican Party is immense.” She pointed to recent comments by longtime GOP strategist and Bush White House aide Mary Matalin, who told CNN: “The Republicans would not have ascended to the majority in 1994 without Rush Limbaugh.
Castellanos echoed that judgment: “He is, I wouldn’t say the intellectual leader, but an intellectual leader of the Republican Party.” The larger problem, he says, is the way that Limbaugh’s comments reinforce a Democratic narrative about conservatives who oppose abortion. “We have just handed them the cudgel one more time, playing into the stereotype that Republicans are anti-women.”
The larger problem for Republicans dates to the aftermath of the 2010 elections, when the GOP used its new House majority to defund Planned Parenthood. The issue surfaced again when a failed Republican candidate from Georgia helped convince the Komen Foundation to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood, starting a firestorm that caused the breast-cancer group to reverse its decision.
Most Republicans I spoke with on Monday made no attempt to hide their disappointment at what Limbaugh had wrought. “It just prolongs a debate about contraception, and we don’t win that debate. Rush keeps the story going,” says former Virginia congressman Tom Davis.
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