Democrats pounced when Mitt Romney stumbled over his talking points Tuesday and said he’d “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. Now they’re taking it even further: Romney is, Democrats suggest, the biggest threat to women’s rights among the GOP candidates still standing.
It will be a tough sell.
Rick Santorum, after all, has said contraception is immoral for years. And his book contains an attack on women who choose to work outside the home (though Santorum says his wife, uncredited as an author, is responsible for that particular passage.)
But Democrats say that because Romney, who used to be pro-choice and once sought Planned Parenthood’s endorsement, is the most extreme precisely because of how far he has to go in ingratiating himself to conservatives.
“It seems as if Mitt Romney is trying to out-right anybody that’s in the race. I don’t know that his positions really differ, but he uses just as a kind of throwaway line, ‘Oh Planned Parenthood, we’ll get rid of it,’” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) told TPM on a DNC conference call Thursday. “Yes, he was talking about the funding, but that’s what he really meant: ‘We’ll get rid of it.’”
Schakowsky pointed to Romney’s support for personhood amendments and the Blunt Amendment as evidence that he’s going as far to the right as anyone can when it comes to women’s reproductive health. She also noted that Santorum went further than Romney in condemning Rush Limbaugh after he attacked Sandra Fluke.
“It was Mitt Romney who refused to condemn Rush Limbaugh’s vicious attacks on a Georgetown law student who was simply trying to access contraception and other health care services,” Schakowsky said. “Even Rick Santorum says Limbaugh’s comments were ‘absurd,’ but Romney showed no leadership whatsoever, simply saying, ‘It’s not the language I would use.’”
Other Democratic women have piled on Romney in recent days over the Planned Parenthood line. As the primary campaign heads into Illinois — where social issues favor the Democrats a bit more than they did in, say, Alabama and Mississippi — Democrats want to paint “Massachusetts Moderate” Romney as a legitimate extremist when it comes to women’s issues.
Here’s a video Democrats released Friday that pushes the idea that Romney’s too extreme for women:
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