POLITICO
• Mitt Romney’s campaign aides go for Day Three on the flap over a Democratic operative’s comments on CNN about Ann Romney never working “a day in her life,” pushing out over Twitter a write-up of profane comments that liberal talk-show host and comedian Bill Maher made about the issue:
“But what she meant to say, I think, was that Ann Romney has never gotten her ass out of the house to work. No one is denying that being a mother is a tough job, I remember that I was a handful. Okay, but there is a big difference in being a mother, and that tough job, and getting your ass out of the door at 7am when it’s cold, having to deal with the boss, being in a workplace, and even if you’re unhappy you can’t show it for 8 hours, that is a different kind of tough thing,” Maher observed last night.
Maher is not a President Obama adviser (neither, for that matter, is operative Hilary Rosen, despite her ties to the White House and top Democrats), but he is a major donor to the super PAC backing the president, having given the group $1 million. Maher has made incendiary comments about in the past about Republican women like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, although, as conservative strategist Keith Appell noted on Twitter, the remarks about those two didn’t spark widespread outrage among Republicans, pre-donation.
• Regardless, the super PAC donation complicates things for Democrats in terms of distancing themselves from things Maher says, as Team Romney (which has generally has the posture that its own super PAC has nothing to do with them) highlights his verbal bombs.
And Romneyland, which moved swiftly to defend the role of stay-at-home moms and make it a focal point of fundraising and messaging after Ann Romney was criticzed, is making to the most of what it sees as a chance to try to whittle down Obama’s lead with women voters, an edge largely boosted by college-educated women.
As Rich Lowry noted in his column, the economy is Romneyland’s main message, not the battle for the women’s vote. And the president disavowed criticism of Ann Romney, as have his campaign advisers, last week, making hard to ask for fresh ownership of someone else’s comments.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/
