Barack Obama's Problem With Women

A great essay, from Marc Thiessen, "Obama’s women problem":

With polls showing Mitt Romney losing ground with women voters, many in Washington have been buzzing in recent days over Romney’s “woman problem.” They’ve got it backward: It is Barack Obama who has the bigger problem with women.

When he took office in 2009, Obama’s job approval rating with women had reached 70 percent; today it has slipped to 49 percent — a precipitous decline of 21 points. This is why the president has been working overtime to court the women’s vote — weighing in on whether women should be admitted to the Augusta National Golf Club (even though nobody asked what he thought); publicly taking the side of a female Georgetown University law student in her spat with Rush Limbaugh; and forcing religious employers to provide coverage for contraception and abortion-inducing drugs.

But here’s the interesting thing: It’s not working. As these controversies have dominated the news in recent weeks, Obama’s approval rating among women has not gone up; it has actually declined slightly. Why is that? Perhaps it’s because country club membership and who pays for birth control are not the issues women voters are most concerned about...

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